Limelight And Akamai To Stream NFL Games: New CDNs Not Winning Live Business

Updated 12:12pm: Unlike the Olympics where Limelight is the exclusive provider for video, the NFL games will be streamed by both Limelight AND Akamai.

Starting September 4th, the NFL in conjunction with NBC will stream 17 Sunday Night Football games on nfl.com and nbcsports.com. While Limelight had no comment when asked about the recent announcement, I have learned that Limelight and Akamai will be the backend streaming providers working with NBC and the NFL. By my count, this makes at least five major wins or expanded contracts for Limelight in the past few months. Disney, Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon and now the NFL/NBC. While I don't know the terms of the deal and whether the NFL or NBC will be the paying customer, Limelight is already closely working with NBC for the Olympics. The NFL content is new business for Limelight but for Akamai, falls under an existing contract they already have with NBC.

Many of the newer CDNs on the market have been talking for some time now about how they are only focusing on live delivery and how their "next generation" networks are so much better for live streaming than an Akamai or Limelight. But to date, I have yet to see any recently launched CDN win any of the big contracts for all of the live events that have happened or will soon take place. The Olympics, NCAA March Madness, Presidential Debates, Operation MySpace, Oprah's Online Classes, Democratic National Convention, US Open for golf and tennis and the NFL Sunday Night Games amongst others. Akamai, Limelight and Level 3 combined are responsible for doing the delivery for all of these events.

This reinforces the fact that building out a global CDN to truly scale for large live events and have the required capacity and support pieces in place to handle such events is not as easy as some think it is. Live events are unique in that you get one chance and one chance only to get it right. You can't add capacity after the fact like you can with on-demand delivery. The CDN has to be able to route traffic in real time, monitor and report back on the network to the customer in real time and deal with things like content ingestion, splitting streams across the network and working very closely with those who are capturing and encoding all the signals. Successfully delivering large scale live events it still not easy and it takes a very focused and disciplined approach to that specific segment of the market to be successful. The idea that any CDN can come along and simply add capacity and be able to handle large scale live events is just not accurate. 

Comments

[grinsandfun]

Dan - I noticed 2 other groups that have had interesting announcements that with their Live P2P products - seems they could scale - both Velocix (Rawflow) and CDNetworks(Octoshape protocol). What is your thought on these options? *(what Akamai is going to do with RedSwoosh).

http://www.us.cdnetworks.com/service/live_streaming.php

http://velocix.com/pr100708c.php

Lastly - could it be that some are just waiting for LLNW to run out their cash flow - I hear they lost a big customer in NY - even after trying to sell below cost.

(and it seems that someone is hurting the big guys - AKAM just did their quarterly call - lowered estimates for the year - someone is getting this business!)

[Tony Ursillo]

Not sure where the first comment comes from in terms of suggesting Limelight has an exclusive on the Olympics with NBC. Akamai just reported earnings results and explicitly stated how happy it is to be working with NBC on the Summer Olympics, which it has also done every two years for both Summer and Winter.

[Dan Rayburn]

I cover the Velocix and Rawflow deal here:
http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2008/07/velocix-acquire.html

CDNetworks and Octoshape have a similar deal recently announced, but I don't know as many details about it as I do Velocix.

The bottom line is that both companies still have to implement the technology AND sell it. Could be great stuff, but if no one buys it, really does not matter.

Limelight won't run out of cash for quite some time. If I remember correctly, they had $197 million in cash as the end of Q1. Don't know about any big customer you are talking to that they may have lost, but we have seen them sign many new large customers in the past few weeks.

Yes, listening to the Akamai call now. No question that Limelight and Level 3 had the most impact on their M&E business in Q2.

[Dan Rayburn]

Hi Tony, Limelight is the "exclusive" video CDN for the Olympics. Akamai is doing caching of static images only.

As my post states "Many have been asking me today, how Limelight and Akamai could both be streaming the Olympics. They aren't. Limelight is delivering all of the live and on-demand video and Akamai will be caching and delivering a lot of the static content."

[Grinsandfun]

Hate to point out the detail - but "Primary" would be a bit closer to what the PR that LLNW provided indicates. I have not seen any "Exclusive" PR's (*yet*)

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=prnw.20080729.AQTU524&show_article=1&catnum=5

[Dan Rayburn]

Limelight is the only company delivering the video. They use the word primary because if for some reason they fail, Microsoft will go to a backup CDN, that being Level 3.

[David]

Dan,

I'd be interesting to learn more if you had some facts about european or other regions where the IOC has issued licenses for media companies for live streaming, and who were the CDN's there if any. Perhaps there are other regional providers who may have won some business? I can only speak for ChinaCache, but for video within China for the Olympics we are heavily involved.

regards,

David

[Dan Rayburn]

Hi David, there are a lot of little events in Europe, many of which are streamed by regional services providers like you say, some of which can be found at www.cdnlist.com

But for large scale, large volume live event traffic that I am focusing on, there have been only a few events like that that I know of in Europe and Asia outside of the Olympics. Thanks.