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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