AT&T Adds New CDN, Exec to Manage

Doug Mohney — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:22:52 -0400

AT&T has announced a suite of content delivery and digital media solutions to help deliver and distribute video and rich media to the trinity of screens: PC, TV, and mobile device. IDC says the CDN market totaled nearly $900 million in 2007 and expected to grow "significantly" in the future.

To head up AT&T's newly created content business unit, Cathy Martine has been appointed executive vice president--Content Distribution. Martine is a long-term AT&T employee who previously headed up its Internet Telephony division.

The new Digital Media Solutions portfolio includes content distribution and management, broadcast video and even digital signage solutions. To facilitate this move, AT&T has cut strategic relationships with ExendMedia, Qumu and Stratacache; ExtendMedia provides digital content services software, Qumu is a software company that enables organizations to easily capture, manage, publish and distribute live and on-demand video content while leveraging existing IT infrastructure, while Stratacache is a software and services company that provides both multi-platform software and appliance based technology for the delivery of rich media applications on a distributed WAN or Internet/intranet powered enterprise.

AT&T is bragging of nearly $70 million in network infrastructure and development by year end to support its digital media capabilities across the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Once the software expertise of ExtendMedia, Qumu, and Stratacache are integrated with its own capabilities, AT&T expects to offer companies one-stop shopping and simplified network-based solutions to encode, deliver, manage and support video and multimedia files.

For more
- AT&T announces new CDN Services, EVP Martine

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AT&T Pumps CDN at SME

Doug Mohney — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:57:34 -0400

This week, AT&T was busy courting customers of all sizes at Streaming Media East to use their streaming content delivery network. Forbes.com showed up to deliver a customer testimonial; the heavily trafficked site uses AT&T's hosting and streaming service in NYC.

Forbes.com publishes more than 2,500 stories a day and creates video from studios in New York, San Francisco and Hong Kong. The web site gets more traffic on its people-ranking lists than the Super Bowl site on Super Bowl Sunday, according to Forbes.com VP and GM Michael Smith.

When pressed, AT&T representatives wouldn't talk about the number of customers the company has signed up for its streaming service; AT&T has launched streaming on several occasions.

However, AT&T's reluctance to speak this week hasn't stopped Goldman Sachs from dropping the company's entry into the CDN market. AT&T has a "vast captive" customer base and adding CDN services to the company's existing network infrastructure should be of "relative little" marginal cost. Goldman notes there are close to 40 CDN service providers, many of whom have started services in the past year (Ed.--Many of whom will likely end up closing their doors or merging with other players in the next three years)

For more:
- Streaming Media reports on AT&T's streaming CDN push.

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