HD Online Convergence (page 2)

Other HD Video Content Publishers

• Vuze.com (formerly known as Azureus and Zudeo) - Streaming HD using a proprietary player
• Move Networks - Streaming HD using a proprietary player
• DoveTail.tv - This was in beta when I visited. It offers video downloads via peer-to-peer sharing.

Highly Distributed Computing

ON Networks and Vimeo don't have the financial resources to create the infrastructure needed to provide streaming HD video to thousands of site visitors. Instead they turn to CDNs - content delivery networks.

CDNs have been around for about a decade. A lot has changed in that time. In 1998, online video consisted of postage-stamp size (160x120), jerky 10fps clips playing at 40kbps. Now, CDNs stream 1080i (1920x1080) HD at 10Mbps or more.

CDNs accomplish this by creating massive private networks and server farms around the world to host content and deliver it from multiple servers simultaneously. Proximity is critical to download speeds, thus the need for so many server locations.

The largest content delivery network, Akamai Technologies (Akamai is Hawaiian for smart or intelligent) has 1,000 data centers and 25,000 servers in 650 cities and 70 countries. The highly-distributed architecture means Akamai is within one network hop of 90 percent of all internet users worldwide.

The numbers are even more staggering when you consider that the throughput needed to stream HD to one million viewers simultaneously (equivalent to one Neilsen rating point) amounts to 7 terabits (trillion bits) per second.

Akamai research predicts a booming HD future. Half of the content providers polled report they already offer HD online or will offer it by Spring 2009. An additional 30 percent say they'll offer it by Spring 2…