content distribution

Slide inks video partnership deal

Pete Wylie — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:20:05 -0400

Slide Inc., a developer of social networking tools and widgets, has announced several key content distribution deals that will allow the company to differentiate its product offerings.

Slide will show online videos of popular television shows from companies like Time Warner and CBS in customizable video channels called "FunSpace Channels" that sit on users' profiles on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. The company will sell ads alongside the channels, and share the revenue with the content providers as part of the licensing agreement.

Based in San Francisco, Slide was founded in 2005 by Silicon Valley entrepreneur and PayPal founder Max Levchin. Slide's plans to differentiate the FunSpace Channels from other online video offerings by promoting videos based on the amount of times a video is forwarded or recommended to a user's friends on social networks. The company hopes this community-centric model for video sharing will distance it from other competitors whose promotion models usually rely on the sheer number of times viewed.

For more:
- see the Wall Street Journal article here

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

Related articles:
AT&T touts CDN capabilities
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More than a (Future) Billion Served

Doug Mohney — Thu, 29 May 2008 11:28:04 -0400

ABI Research predicts online video viewers will reach at least one billion in five years, a quadrupling of current estimates.

Fuelling the rise in viewers will be a combination of increasing broadband penetration and rising connection speeds. This will make vendors happy across a number of market segments ranging from content owners and Internet portal sites to UGC (User-generated-content) aggregators such as YouTube and video distribution sites such as Apple's iTunes.

ABI also talks about the change in technologies for content distribution shifting from "direct" methods such as CDNs, peer-to-peer networks, and hybrid approaches. No discussion on how a healthy appetite for video might affect hardware vendors such as Cisco or network providers such as AT&T or Verizon.

Traditional pay-TV operators are supposedly at risk and need to take an "if you can't beat them, join them" approach by offering access to content via alternative platforms, adapting web content distribution via their traditional model and include advertising support--sounds like what NBC is doing.

For more:
- ABI's Billions of Online Video Viewers report.

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