Level 3 Launches New CDN Focused Website, Level3Delivers.com

For the past few months, Level 3 has been working on building a brand new video based website dedicated to showcasing their content delivery offering in the market. Yesterday, the site Level3Delivers.com went live with nearly 75 video clips that do a really great job of telling the Level 3 CDN story.

The mini video portal has interviews with Level 3 executives, customers and features a whole bunch of case studies and shows logos from such customers as Netflix, Microsoft, Comcast and Yahoo! amongst others. The videos provide a great insight into Level 3's entire CDN ecosystem including Vyvx and their broadcast operations services and it's great to see Level 3 really focus an entire website to their CDN offering. The new site is well thought out, provides answers to a lot of technical questions about their ecosystem and will be a valuable sales tool for Level 3 when pitching content owners.

A few weeks back, I got to spend a good deal of time with Level 3 executives at the Content Delivery Summit and Streaming Media East shows. I also recently had a call with Peter Neill, the new SVP of content markets for Level 3 to hear more about their CDN strategy. While some of our conversation was off the record, what I can say from the calls and meetings is that while some turmoil came out of the changes made within the CDN group last month, Level 3 is clearly still committed to their CDN offering.

At the Streaming Media East show, the biggest thing I heard Level 3 competitors talking about was just how many Level 3 sales reps were at the show looking for new jobs, implying that Level 3 was really losing people. Yet when I asked Level 3 competitors if any of them were going to hire these reps, they all commented that most of them weren't qualified. So while Level 3 has been losing and cutting some account managers, it does not sound like it's due to anything negative at Level 3. Level 3 still continues to sign up large content owners and I still think they are on track to do nearly $100M this year in total CDN revenue, defined as streaming, software downloads and small object delivery.

Comments

[Billy "Beer" Carter]

These guys are going down the tubes and I'm not convinced they have a real business, certainly not long term. Telecom companies aren't software companies and they should stop pretending they are.