We hear a lot about CDNs and P2P technologies being used to deliver video over the Internet. It is a confusing area to most and a little clarification may help to see where Neokast is on the spectrum.

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) utilize servers to deliver media content or video to users. These servers can be configured in many ways to optimize that delivery in order to achieve various ends such as higher quality and lower cost. Examples of such CDNs are Akamai and The FeedRoom. We term these as topdown or server dependent networks. They use old, but reliable technology to deliver video streaming or downloading. Their scalability is very poor because they have to provide bandwidth to “push” each stream. For the same reason, high quality video is prohibitively expensive because higher quality consumes proportionately more bandwidth. Hybrid CDNs are similar to CDNs except that they overlay the CDN structure often using a mesh or grid technology along with aspects of P2P technology in order to achieve some efficiencies and economize on bandwidth consumption. Examples of Hybrid CDNs are Joost, Veoh, GridNetworks and many others including some Chinese networks. All of the Hybrid CDNs are ultimately dependent on the server network which provides the “push” to the video and all usually provide economies over normal CDNs. Neokast is unique in being a bottom-up network. Neokast is not dependent on a backbone of servers to provide the “push” except in the trivial case of your own laptop that can upload video to the Neokast Network. While servers may be used in special cases to enhance the Neokast Network, we are not dependent on them as are the CDNs and Hybrids.

Future posts will address other questions that have been raised including the implications of these structures, the differences between streaming and downloading and other topics.

If any of our readers have specific questions to ask we welcome them at questions@neokast.com. We are interested in promoting a discussion of any questions you care to bring up.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 25th, 2007 at 8:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.