Reliable Object Caching, Digital Download Services Are Key to Helping Media Properties Transition from Analog to Digital Media Environments

TEWKSBURY, Mass. – June 30, 2008 – Mirror Image® Internet <http://www.mirror-image.com/> , a leading provider of content delivery solutions powered by a patented global network, today announced that Inergize Digital Media is leveraging the Mirror Image network to reliably deliver Object Caching and Digital Download Services.

Inergize Digital Media, a division of Newport Television LLC, assists media properties as they make the transition from an analog media environment to a digital media environment. Inergize Digital Media focuses on helping stations build a digital distribution strategy that allows them to extend their reach in the marketplace; increase effectiveness for advertisers; drive new revenue streams; increase share of time; and provide engaging opportunities with advertisers. Inergize Digital Media works with various departments at TV stations to teach their staff how to best integrate the web into their everyday operations.

“Mirror Image offered the best performance for object caching and was flexible on meeting our business requirements,” said Michael Tholkes, Vice President of Operations for Inergize Digital Media. “We evaluated many other content distribution networks before selecting Mirror Image.
And we are confident that it will help us reduce our future capital costs because we will not need to add additional hardware to support traffic as it increases. We plan to off-load traffic to our data center by caching our objects on the Mirror Image network, which will increase the speed of delivering our assets to end-users.”

“We are very proud of the services we are able to offer Inergize Digital Media as the company looks to enhance its offerings,” said James G.
Hart, Vice President, Sales and Marketing at Mirror Image Internet. “With our unlimited global capacity and patented network, we are able to support Inergize Digital Media’s increased traffic and the fast delivery of objects and digital media to their end-users. This gives media properties the chance to transition smoothly into the digital age.”

Mirror Image currently serves hundreds of leading organizations in the retail, advertising, media and entertainment and government markets.
Visit www.mirror-image.com for full details.

About Inergize Digital Media

Inergize Digital Media operates more than 59 Media Web sites in 39 markets. A division of Newport Television, the unit provides media properties with systems, technology, sales and marketing strategies to compete in a digital world. The multi-platform digital management system provides stations with an integrated solution to distribute content and serve their local communities and advertisers.

About Mirror Image Internet
Mirror Image® Internet <http://www.mirror-image.com/> , Inc. combines a patented global network with results-driven content delivery solutions to help customers deploy, monitor and refine online strategies. The company’s track record of success has given leading retailers, advertisers, media companies and enterprises the control they need to maximize assets and reduce costs while enhancing the visitor experience.

Recognized by Internet Retailer magazine as the 2007 Vendor Leader in the Content Delivery Network Category, and EContent magazine as one of the 100 “Companies That Matter Most” in the digital content industry, Mirror Image is a U.S.-based company incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in Tewksbury, Mass. Mirror Image was founded in 1997. For additional information, please visit www.mirror-image.com or call +1 866 374 4113.

LOS ANGELES — BitGravity, the new Burlingame-based content delivery network, has a focus on the quality live video streaming market. The company has signed some impressive companies including Revision3 which uses the solution to stream diggnation and other programming.

Source: http://www.beet.tv/2008/06/bitgravity-has.html

David Welch, Brain Cancer Survivor, Leverages the Highwinds CDN to Deliver Educational Videos to a Growing Global Audience

WINTER PARK, Fla., June 30 /PRNewswire/ — Highwinds Network Group, Inc., a multi-platform IP services and content distribution provider, today announced that it is contributing to 38 Lemon’s mission of raising brain cancer awareness by providing video hosting and delivery services for the organization. David Welch was diagnosed at age 38 with a lemon-sized brain tumor widely considered inoperable. Over the past three years, Welch has documented his journey as a brain cancer survivor on his web site, http://www.38lemon.com, which reaches and seeks to educate nearly 40,000 new visitors a month and had over 10 million hits in the past year alone. Highwinds is supporting Welch in his efforts by contributing its CDN (Content Delivery Network) services for the delivery of several videos over its high-performance RollingThunder(TM) network.

Source: http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/06-30-2008/0004840934&EDATE=

By Justin Lee, theWhir.com
June 27, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Web hosting provider Webair (webair.com) announced on Thursday it is now offering its global content delivery network services, enabling users to deliver content with “unparalleled throughput and responsiveness.” Level 1 PCI DSS Certified Service Provider! DataPipe delivers the best network & support; top tier data centers; New York metro, Silicon Valley, London, Hong Kong, Shanghai. DataPipe - Personal Touch, Global Reach. The launch marks a growing trend in web hosting providers incorporating content delivery network services into their plans. Softlayer recently launched its own content delivery network product last month, as well as added several new features to the product.
The company says Webair CDN enables video to play smoothly without any stalling or choppiness, cue audio files instantly, as if they were on your hard drive and download software quickly to achieve high completion rates. Webair CDN offers PUSH technology which provides customers with greater control over the content on the CDN and enables them to receive instant content updates without having to change meta tags or wait for cache timeouts. And while traditional cache based CDN delete the customer’s content after the allotted set time is reached, Webair CDN duplicates content and stores it globally and distributes it instantly. This allows for a faster, more robust type of CDN, says Webair.

Source: http://www.thewhir.com/marketwatch/062708_Web_Host_Webair_Offers_CDN_Services.cfm

CDN stands for Content Delivery(or Distribution) Network. It is a network of servers usually located in various geographic locations to improve the availability and access speed of a website (or webapp or other media). The main use of CDNs were during the nineteens when inter-continental access was slow, scarce and expensive. Origin server could be in the silicon valley, users from UK would access the node located in UK, so in theory only once the page would be downloaded from the US server to the UK server. Thus allowing the UK visitors to access the page locally resulting in a huge saving in inter-continental bandwidth costs and improved access times for the end users.

Source: http://www.sajalkayan.com/make-your-own-cheap-charlie-cdn.html

I don’t know this guy nor have I made a full study of this but just briefly scanning it, it looks interesting. Check it out yourself and post a comment to this article. Thanks!

Internap Network Services Corporation (NASDAQ:INAP), a global provider of end-to-end Internet business solutions, announced today it is working with SmacChat.com to provide spirited sports fans a forum for communicating about their favorite teams. Internap’s incomparable Content Delivery Network (CDN) is being leveraged by SmacChat.com to build an expansive online venue for its users that will be able to scale as memberships increase.

SmacChat.com, a Web-based social networking platform, is built for sports enthusiasts looking to rally for the next big game, rant about their team’s latest wins or losses, or ‘trash-talk’ with followers of opposing teams. The free site features live, interactive chat rooms for every major athletic event nationwide. Sports blogs also allow for real-time discussions on the hottest games, and live scores and betting lines keep every fan up to speed on their team’s progress. Prior to the launch of the site, fans relied on sources such as sports talk radio shows to share their opinions on recent or upcoming games. SmacChat.com now provides a real-time venue for more than 112,000 visitors to the site each day.

Source: http://www.ad-hoc-news.de/Aktie/12718193/News/17952668/NETWORK.html

Yesterday, there was a lot of talk about AT&T (T) and its CDN announcement and as usual, a lot of questions, mostly from Wall Street, on what this means to Akamai (AKAM) and the rest of the CDN industry. While many sites covered the news, I saw very few sites give more details on what, if any, impact this has on the market. Lots of re-hash of the press release with very little additional info or data to compare AT&T’s plans with the rest of the market.

To me, the important take away of the announcement was AT&T’s appointment of Cathy Martine as the executive vice president of Content Distribution. AT&T has had technical folks working on its CDN offering since last year, but to date, did not have anyone leading the business. It’s really hard to start any new product offering in the market if no one is responsible for it on the business side, which AT&T now has. A 25+ year veteran at AT&T, Cathy formerly launched and ran the company’s VoIP product line but will now focus solely on the CDN business. Late yesterday, I had a chance to speak to Cathy and some of her technical team to get my questions answered.

Source: http://seekingalpha.com/article/82560-at-t-s-cdn-offering-won-t-displace-akamai-or-limelight-anytime-soon

As usual, Dan puts it all into perspective…

San Diego, California - (The Hosting News) - June 25, 2008 - Global, full-service content delivery network (CDN) and ”Cloud Storage” platform provider optimized for media, Nirvanix, have developed a strategic alliance to offer what it reports is the industry’s only unified cloud storage and content delivery service.

Richard Villars, Vice President for Storage Systems research at IDC noted, ”Maximizing the monetary value of all digital content is a requirement for all companies, but is especially critical for companies in the entertainment and e-learning industries. They need solutions that allow them to quickly deliver the latest popular content while also making rich pools of archival content available for discriminating customers. The combination of solutions like Nirvanix’s cloud-based Storage Delivery Network with a content delivery network like CDNetworks will make it easier for content owners to cost-effectively make all of their content available to the widest range of customers.”

Leading rich media CDN delivers top blip.tv shows

Los Angeles, CA June 25, 2008 - EdgeCast Networks, the superior, cost-effective rich media content delivery network (CDN), today announced that its network is powering the video delivery for blip.tv, the Internet television network that powers the world’s leading Web shows.

Source: http://press.blip.tv/?p=30

CloudNAS™ installs an “infinite” storage gateway in minutes

SAN DIEGO – June 25, 2008 – Nirvanix, the premier “Cloud Storage” platform provider optimized for media and large files, today announced the beta of a groundbreaking new set of products that attaches the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network to a local network as a Windows or Linux filer using standard industry networking protocols. Users can then work with the applications they are accustomed to, or simply drag and drop files from their desktops to Nirvanix’s award-winning storage service.

“Nirvanix CloudNAS represents a significant advancement in cloud storage,” said Patrick Harr, CEO of Nirvanix. “Previously, enterprises could only access cloud storage by programming to an API. Now with CloudNAS, customers can immediately integrate Nirvanix’s cloud storage into their existing applications and processes, and forego new purchases of expensive NetApp, EMC, IBM or other NAS products in favor of Nirvanix’s storage-as-a-service offering.”

Since CloudNAS is built on the Storage Delivery Network, storage administrators can point, click and configure their storage accounts to mirror to one or more locations automatically. This eliminates the need for backups, data migrations and other complexities of data management all at a cost that is a fraction of what it costs with “storage boxes.”

One recent third-party study of 67 medium to large enterprises indicated that owning and maintaining network attached storage can cost between $15 to $43 per gigabyte per year based on storage class. Based on these costs, the Nirvanix SDN is one-fifth or less the total cost of ownership of typical NAS vendor offerings. The study is currently available at www.nirvanix.com.

Nirvanix is launching CloudNAS as part of a beta program targeting companies that maintain repositories of archival, backup or unstructured data that requires long-term storage and use, or companies that use automated processes to transfer files to mapped drives. The Linux-based NFS mount version of CloudNAS uses RedHat 5 or Suse 10. The CIFS version of CloudNAS must be installed either on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or Microsoft Windows XP. Beta testers must be able to test and provide feedback during the beta period. Program participants will be offered special licensing terms to upgrade to the full release following completion of the beta program.

Companies interested in participating should visit Nirvanix.com and use the support contact form or email customersupport@nirvanix.com.

CloudNAS will be available to all Nirvanix customers following successful beta testing.

About The Storage Delivery Network
Nirvanix has built a global cluster of storage nodes collectively referred to as the Storage Delivery Network (SDN), powered by the Nirvanix Internet Media File System (IMFS). The SDN intelligently stores, delivers and processes storage requests in the best network location, providing the best user experience in the marketplace. With the ability to store multiple file copies in multiple geographic nodes, the SDN enables unparalleled data availability for developers, businesses and enterprises.
By using the Nirvanix SDN versus alternatives such as adding network storage systems or using first generation online storage platforms, businesses are guaranteed a shorter time-to-market, 80% savings over building their own storage operations, and also benefit from better flexibility and control for their operations.

About Nirvanix
Nirvanix is the premier global “Cloud Storage” platform provider. Headquartered in San Diego, California, Nirvanix is privately held and has raised more than $18 million in funding from world-class investors including Intel Capital. Nirvanix customers include Fortune 50, media and entertainment and innovative Web 2.0 customers. For more information about the company and its services, visit www.nirvanix.com.