Internap Network Services Corporation, a global provider of end-to-end Internet business solutions, announced enhancements to its Content Delivery Network (CDN) offering, including new ease-of-use functions and automation of key CDN capabilities. Exclusively delivered with Internap’s Performance IP™ service – which ensures optimal video delivery across the Internet – these enhancements deliver an intelligent video streaming solution that simplifies and automates content creation, management and reporting with the highest quality end user experience.According to comScore’s Video Metrix service, during the month of September 2009, more than 84.8% of the total U.S. Internet audience watched online video, and the average online viewer watched 9.8 hours of video. As more organizations look to adopt video CDNs as part of their marketing strategy and business operations, they also face cost and complexity challenges associated with delivering high-quality content across an increasingly diverse device landscape of PCs, netbooks and mobile phones. Additionally, as video usage broadens beyond the user-generated content and over-the-top media and entertainment markets and becomes a core enterprise tool for communicating with business-critical audiences – such as employees, customers, investors and partners – ensuring the highest quality experience to those consumers by overcoming issues of network latency, congestion and downtime are also becoming key CDN requirements.
Internap’s CDN addresses these challenges with a fully-integrated solution for live and on-demand video streaming – with the Adobe® Flash® Platform, Microsoft® Silverlight™ and iPhone formats – that allows organizations to focus exclusively on content creation by simplifying and streamlining the workflow for content uploading, transcoding, management and reporting. By leveraging Internap’s patented MIRO™ (Managed Internet Route Optimizer) technology – which dynamically selects the best path for video traffic across multiple Internet backbones based on network performance characteristics instead of the least number of Internet hops – organizations are assured of a highly-reliable CDN with guaranteed uptime and performance-based service level agreements.
“Our collaboration with Internap provides customers with a one-stop shop for seamless delivery of high-quality online video,” said Bill Rusitzky, senior director for media alliances at Adobe. “Internap’s CDN utilizing the Adobe Flash Platform is optimized for delivery to a broad range of operating systems and devices while providing the network performance and high-quality experience customers expect from Internet video today.”
Through its partnerships and enhancements to its CDN solution, Internap provides customers with the ability to maximize the consuming audience by addressing the broadest range of devices across the Internet. According to comScore Media Metrix, approximately 75 percent of online videos viewed worldwide are delivered using Adobe Flash technology, making it the No. 1 technology for video on the Web. Adobe Flash Player — already installed on 98 percent of Internet-connected desktops — gives viewers access to rich content without having to download additional software.
The new ease-of-use features within Internap’s CDN MediaConsole® 5.0 CDN include:
Integrated, rule-based transcoding – automatically converts video into the ideal formats for a broad range of devices, allowing content to reach the widest audience possible without additional management and development costs.
Integrated adaptive bitrate – continuous bitrate adjustment dynamically adapts video streams based on the capabilities and bandwidth of the network, ultimately ensuring that the best quality video is delivered to an individual device.
Advanced analytics and reporting – enables video campaign refinement through: comprehensive statistics for individual video streams delivered; audience geographical information; and audience viewing habits by file, directory or custom segmentation, among other capabilities.
“Microsoft is committed to helping partners deliver the highest quality online video with Silverlight,” said Steve Sklepowich, director for Silverlight at Microsoft Corp. “Internap’s enhancements to their CDN provide their customers with a simplified content creation and delivery solution, allowing them to more efficiently deliver high quality video with interactivity using Silverlight across the Web.”
“Video is the single most immersive, engaging and effective form of electronic communication, but the cost and complexity associated with high-quality delivery has held it back from being even more widely used on the Web,” said Peter Evans, senior vice president of marketing at Internap. “Internap’s CDN enhancements address this issue by automating the entire process from video creation to management to delivery, and then delivering superior performance with the industry’s only route-optimized CDN for video quality that you can see. This finally frees enterprises to focus on delivering valuable content to drive their business and not worry about the technology behind managing and distributing it. ”
Internap is showcasing its CDN offering, along with its Performance IP service, at Streaming Media West, November 17-19, in San Jose, Calif. in booth 601.
