Amazon has recently begun offering customers use of their own CDN, titled CloudFront. While many have hailed this release as the beginning fo the end of traditional CDN’s such as Akami and Limelight, not everyone is so quick to jump on the bandwagon. Over on Business of Video, Dan Rayburn has a few words of wisdom on the subject:
This is a great service for smaller customers who have very specific needs but it won’t challenge any of the major CDNs for years to come. Amazon would have to add so much additional functionality to the service that it would take years just to build and deploy it. Too many people are under the wrong assumption that all you have to do is deploy a bunch of boxes and turn them up and then all of a sudden you can then compete with the major CDNs. It takes a lot more than just a ton of boxes and bandwidth to compete with Akamai or Limelight in terms of size, scale and functionality, not to mention revenue. Which is proven by the fact that after Limelight, the next closest company in terms of CDN revenue is doing less than half of Limelight’s total revenue for this year.
So while Amazon is taking a step in the right direction, they are still a long way off from actually becoming a major player in the CDN game. CDN delivery still remains expensive and out of reach for many businesses, and it is companies such as ClickStreamTV that is working within the system to provide the delivery method to small businesses. Amazon’s affordable CDN can serve as a foundation for companies, but without the proper development technicians it doesn’t matter how well content can be streamed. If Amazon wants to up the ante, they would do well in turning their video service into a public product, selling not only content, but a means to display it.
Why Amazon’s CDN Offering Is No Threat To Akamai, Limelight or CDN Pricing [Business of Video]
