2012-10-03 11:19:47 | Technology news Press Release

Jet-Stream unveils new product line

London - CDN World Summit

Jet-Stream unveils new CDN product line

CDN industry thought and technology leader Jet-Stream today announces a new product line to help CDN operators to further reduce costs and professionalize video delivery network services.

Jet-Stream VideoExchange: the premium CDN
Jet-Stream announces the direct availability of VideoExchange 10.7, it's flagship media delivery network management solution. The new release focusses on advanced HTTP adaptive streaming technologies, adding exclusive new features to improve manageability, performance and availability of Apple HLS, Adobe HDS, Microsoft Smooth and MPEG DASH technologies.

VideoExchange 10.7 is being deployed in one of the largest telecom operators in the world, is also being deployed to replace the existing Telenor CDN and existing Jet-Stream licensed and managed customers are going to upgrade to v10l.7 and extend their contracts with Jet-Stream.

VideoExchange is the widest adopted CDN technology with over 30 deployments and brings unmatched broadcast grade technologies that go beyond the best effort technologies that other CDNs and vendors offer.

VideoExchange is a meta CDN that supports a wide range of delivery vendor products, guaranteeing agility, flexibility, 100% compliancy and future proof operation in a volatile industry.

The solution reduces CAPEX and OPEX to the maximum. Jet-Stream is further positioning VideoExchange as the premium CDN solution, raising licensing rates.

Jet-Stream WebAcceleration: high performance, low cost CDN
Jet-Stream announces the direct availability of a new product: Jet-Stream WebAcceleration. This high performance caching and DNS based system is the easiest to deploy and operate CDN solution in our industry. It fully supports retail and wholesale usage and helps content providers hosting providers, telecom operators and CDN operators to offload their web and HTTP streaming platforms, to reduce costs and to monetize CDN services.

Jet-Stream WebAcceleration is going to be deployed in one of the largest telecom operators in the world and can run standalone or side by side with the Jet-Stream VideoExchange solution. The solution is fully webbased manageable and dynamically auto provisions updates to caches and DNS servers.

Jet-Stream WebAcceleration is powered by the popular NGINX caching engine. Most CDNs rely on Squid but that technology is getting outdated. NGINX is used by next generation CDNs including Netflix. Jet-Stream closely works together with NGINX, further tuning and enhancing NGINX for premium HTTP adaptive streaming technologies. Some modules will be open sourced and will be used by one of the worlds' largest global CDNs. Other modules are kept proprietary by Jet-Stream.

Jet-Stream is positioning WebAcceleration as a high volume, lowest CAPEX, lowest OPEX solution. WebAcceleration will be priced very aggressively, allowing anyone to enter the CDN industry, start monetizing content delivery services and start reducing traffic loads in their networks.

Jet-Stream OpenCDN Appliance: future proof, agile, compliant, reliable and high performance.
Jet-Stream unveils 'project EscapeVelocity': The OpenCDN Appliance is a next generation unified media server, offering 20Gbps performance consuming less than 60watt at peak.

The OpenCDN appliance natively runs all popular delivery technologies including NGINX, Wowza Media Server, Adobe FMiS, Internet Information Server, Windows Media Services, Apache and many others.

This native parallel services plugin model guarantees 100% compliancy, future proof operation, maximum agility and flexibility in a very volatile industry that faces disruptive technology changes every 9 to 16 months.

The Jet-Stream OpenCDN appliance is a major upgrade of the unified Jet-Stream XL media server with added tuning and acceleration enhancements. XL Media Server is the first unified media server in the industry, leveraging over 12 years of unbeaten uptime, performance, reliability, future proof guarantee, agility and compliancy.

The Jet-Stream OpenCDN Appliance will be positioned above existing vendor solutions: premium means premium. The Jet-Stream OpenCDN Appliance will be also be made available as a very aggressively priced open components system so CDN operators can use COTS components to minimize costs in the delivery layer.

Integrated solution
The Jet-Stream OpenCDN Appliance can be used by both the Jet-Stream VideoExchange and Jet-Stream WebAcceleration CDN solutions, at the same time, further reducing CAPEX and OPEX in the delivery layer.

Stef van der Ziel, CEO of Jet-Stream says that telecom operators, content publishers and CDN operators face three challenges:

"The first challenge is to move from best effort to premium delivery infrastructure to enable end to end SLAs and QoS throughout the value chain. Our VideoExchange solution is the only product on the market that enables this."

"The second challenge is to reduce costs in operations and infrastructure. All our solutions bring maximum efficiency in operation and workflow automation. We also eliminate all costs in overhead hardware and with our OpenCDN appliance we disrupt the industry by enabling flexibility and agility while further reducing costs to the minimum.

"The third challenge is the entry barrier and monetization. Most CDNs have never seen any profitability. Jet-Stream knows how to turn CDNs into profitable businesses and introduces the WebAcceleration at disruptive prices. Our goal is not to sell appliances but to enable anyone to become a profitable CDN."

About Jet-Stream
Jet-Stream researches, develops and licenses next-generation Content Delivery Network (CDN) technologies. These technologies enable publishers, broadcasters and internet providers to scale and professionalize video delivery over the web and mobile networks. Jet-Stream technology is used by many IP network operators around the globe to offload traffic on their infrastructures and to monetize premium content delivery services for three screens IPTV, mobile content, web content and OTT content. The award winning StreamZilla CDN is operated by Jet-Stream. For more information visit www.jet-stream.com and www.streamzillacdn.com

Media Contacts
Caroline van Houten
Marketing, Jet-Stream
Tel +31 50 5261820
caroline@jet-stream.com

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2012-08-07 10:32:42 | Technology

Jet-Stream WebAcceleration

Jet-Stream is proud to announce a new product: WebAcceleration. 

• Powered by the industry leading NGINX engine, purpose tuned and optimized by Jet-Stream
• 20Gbps performance on new 1U <60Watt peak servers
• Brand new modern core management engine with full automatic cache and DNS provisioning
• Intelligent geo optimized DNS based request routing engine
• IPv4 and IPv6 fully supported
• Easy interface to manage nodes, groups, networks, provision accounts and accelerate websites
• Deploy, install, configure and go in days!
• Can share server resources with the VideoExchange CDN
• ... 

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2012-08-02 10:30:38 | Technology

New Jet-Stream VideoExchange release

Jet-Stream is proud to announce version 10.7 of our industry leading CDN software. This release introduces many new innovative core technologies around HTTP adaptive streaming. 

Commodity or Premium?

Virtually all Internet CDNs have a very hard time with monetization of video delivery. Most Internet CDNs are unprofitable; some subsidize CDN service through other revenue streams, for instance, from their connectivity business. Others rely on investor subsidies for their CDN service survival. So if CDNs make money, it has not been from premium video delivery, but rather from their enterprise services, dynamic acceleration and cloud service offers.

Which begs the question; is CDN video delivery now a commodity? Yes, if you buy CDN video delivery capacity from one of any number of large Internet CDNs on a best effort platform, using good enough internet, with best effort caching and best effort request routing with mediocre control panels and APIs. But these are poor services.  Jet-Stream perceives a trend: Investment in internet CDNs video delivery functionality falls: because it is simply profitless. 

Does this mean that all CDNs fail to commercialize video delivery? Not at all!

Telecom operators need CDNs to offer all-screen services and to open their CDNs for wholesale scenarios to for customers and subscribers. These telcos need an on-net CDN anyway and the investments here are backed by IPTV and digital cable revenues. They incur no direct CDN running costs: they already have a network plus next generation CDN technologies enable them to roll-out and operate Terabit-sized CDNs at minimal cost compared to that which Internet CDNs have spent.

StreamZilla, our 100% Jet-Streams' owned CDN platform only delivers video. At profit margins in excess 45% per annum since launch, it demonstrates organic growth of over 1600% during the past five years as proof that profit is possible. How did StreamZilla manage this without the benefits that telcos have? We made a very important decision: innovation.

The Jet-Stream VideoExchange CDN suite is a unique solution, built from scratch for pure, premium media delivery. We deliberately and completely ignored legacy technology choices and invented totally new core CDN technologies for distribution and request routing. Our API's and self service web interface consoles  are designed to integrate media workflow, so that broadcasters tap directly into the CDN and control it as they require. As our core focus is on premium media delivery it means the demands of 99.999% uptime and ultra performance are totally satisfied.

No other CDN vendor offers such simple interfaces, ease of control or intelligence, because their legacy underlying core technologies makes it impossible for them to deliver the same control, granularity and performance that an innovative,  ground up Jet-Stream development gaurentees operators. 

Of course innovative technology is nice if it serves a purpose. Jet-Stream's focus has always been the business case as opposed to your average box vendor: how does technology help telecom operators and broadcasters turn their services into a successful business? A key question Jet-Stream asks repeatedly before we invent new features and launch them to market. 

So going back to the question: are CDNs a commodity? Yes because you can buy video delivery services from many CDNs. The great development in the industry is that the technology is available at low costs, for anyone. It means that telcos and broadcasters can deliver independently. However, commodity also implies that all CDN services are homogeneous. Fortunately, this is untrue as Jet-Stream proves over and over again, since Quality of service (QoS) and rich features differentiate us from other delivery vendors and one which we prove daily against best effort, loss-leading Internet CDNs.

So expect Jet-Stream to continue to innovate video delivery. Just another example of how we take HTTP adaptive bit rate (ABR) streaming to a whole new level:

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2012-05-07 11:02:26 | broadcastgrade Technology

CDN compliancy tips for media players

Tips for media players by CDN veterans: 

Make sure your client is streaming server and CDN compliant!

This blog article helps developers of Smart TVs, Smart Phones, Tablets, SetTopBoxes and Software video clients to better understand the dynamics of a Content Delivery Network so they can improve the way their client integrates with Content Delivery Networks.

Tip 1: Implement the full HTTP 1.1 specification: HTTP redirect

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2012-02-24 14:40:48 | Technology

Downsides of HTTP adaptive bit rate streaming

I wrote a number of articles about the shortcomings of HTTP Adaptive Bit Rate Streaming (HABS). 

Jet-Stream R&D identified another number of issues that cripple massive adoption of these technologies:

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