Running The Middle Mile

Cable World, May 1, 2000 by Matt Stump

The key going forward isn't streaming as a discrete thing but a true interactive experience. Increasingly, content providers don't say: `I need someone should do my static content, someone should do my dynamic content, someone should do my streaming applications.'

A Web site builds a whole experience around content, data, personalization, multimedia, streaming audio and video, and graphics. They need to be on a platform that can insure the whole experience arrives the way it's designed.

CW: What does the InterVu purchase do for you?

It's important to us because we saw so much demand for streaming. By partnering with an early leader, we gained many experienced people in engineering and operations.

As we build more and more applications, it's important to have really great people to do it. More people in sales to go after even more business quickly. And our technologies were very compatible.

CW: Weren't you competitors?

Yes, in some spaces. We both did streaming. But InterVu was not in the content delivery business. When we looked at it, there was much less overlap than things that were complementary.

CW: InterVu had some CNN money, right?

CNN was already a customer of both of ours, and they'll become an Akamai shareholder.

CW: And AOL?

We have an announced relationship with AOL.

CW: What's your business model? Per use fees, maintenance fees?

The simplest way to think about it is, the more you use our network, the more you pay. There's no capex charge. You're not buying software. You're buying shared utilization of our large network.

CW: What percentage of your videostreaming traffic is 10 minutes or less vs. long-form?

We haven't broken out those numbers. But I would say in my experience it's still more short-form video than long-form video. Audio tends to skew longer because people let it play longer.

CW: How do you think those two respective markets will develop?

It's not just all audio or all video. You've got business use. You've got music. You've got entertainment. You've got information.

There are many vertical market opportunities.

CW: How real is IP videoconferencing?

You're going to see a lot more live videoconferencing or live multimedia because there's a lot of ROI there and cost savings for business. You'll see a great deal of adoption. Those applications can be put on the Akamai network.

CW: Is there anything you're waiting on these days? An industry, a technology?

We're in what you'd call the tornado on content delivery. We've doubled our customer base quarter-over-quarter. There is huge demand for content delivery and streaming. We've got a long list of future things we are developing for our customers.

CW: Do you have any frustration with the last mile out there?

I say to people that my Web experience was in the first mile, building large Web sites. My experience launching Road Runner was about the last mile.

There's a third component, the middle mile. It's not architected. It doesn't function well. Akamai is about solving the middle mile problem.

The better the first mile, the better for Akamai. And the more optimized last mile, the more broadband, the better. It increases demand for what we do. I share the industry's frustration that broadband hasn't grown even more quickly.