Yesterday, Akamai (AKAM) "officially" announced support for variable bit rate streaming of live and on-demand video content for the iPhone and iPod touch and has launched a new showcase site at iphone.akamai.com. The site which has been live for about a month, showcases content from about a dozen content providers including FOX News, MTV and USA Today amongst others.

Akamai's new iPhone streaming service is based on the standard HTTP delivery protocol which for Akamai, means they can utilize more of their HTTP network infrastructure as opposed to proprietary based streaming protocols. Earlier in the week I came across the showcase site and tested the quality and while it looks pretty good, there were times when the video appeared choppy. Hard to know what exactly caused that as the videos as they play now, don't give you any performance or quality indicators in the player to know if your connection is having problems. That's one feature I'd like to see in the player and one that most PC based video players already have built in.

By Jon "DRJ" Najarian

Akamai Technologies (AKAM) has fallen sharply in recent weeks but popped more than 5.5 percent yesterday as options traders rushed into upside calls.

Level 3 (LVLT) poised for major broadband demand. A bullish analyst view from Mike Sapien, a principal analyst for Ovum, a telecommunications, software and IT analysis company with offices worldwide.

As a result of LVLT's nine acquisitions in the last five years, the company not only supplies fiber optics network infrastructure to companies like Comcast Corp. (CMCSA), AT&T Inc. (T), Sprint Nextel Corp. (S) and EarthLink Inc. (ELNK), but it is moving into the "enterprise" sector, which LVLT calls its Business Markets Group.

Through the '90s, Cisco Systems (CSCO) was known as one of the “4 Horsemen of IT” and was even the largest company by market cap ($500 B) at the peak of the tech bubble in early 2000. The web is the driver of all information worldwide over the past two decades, thus all recent tech trends revolve around the internet: mobilization, cloud computing, virtualization, social networking and much more. Consequently, Cisco is the dominant provider of the networking gear that runs the internet. More specifically, Cisco’s bread and butter has been the ethernet switches and overall router markets with approximately 70% and 50% of the market share, respectively. To sustain revenue growth, companies like CSCO must adapt to tech trends and enter new markets outside of its core business.

Breaking Ties

While going through some of my old files, I came across a bunch of my pricing data from 2005. This was around the time I started collecting CDN pricing a couple of times a year and the charts below show pricing from the market in 2005 based on per MB sustained, per GB delivered and includes pricing on storage as well.

While no one who follows the space will be shocked to see just how far pricing has dropped over the past five years, it's also funny to look at the buckets of volume that were being priced back then and what was considered to be a large volume customer, compared to today.

There has been plenty of confusion about what cloud computing is thanks to a multitude of ways in which virtualization and IT services can be deployed and marketed. This has contributed to a vast array of papers and articles and blogs defining cloud computing.

Underneath the haze of “everything becomes cloud because cloud is a hot topic” confusion, a new term is rising on the horizon; and its pretty interesting. There are no doubt others using the term “intercloud”, but I think Cisco (CSCO) has really stepped up the discussion.

By Dr. Declan Fallon

These picks are from a scan looking for stocks making new highs on heavier volume:

For the past few months, Level 3 (LVLT) has been working on building a brand new video based website dedicated to showcasing its content delivery offering in the market. Yesterday, the site Level3Delivers.com went live with nearly 75 video clips that do a really great job of telling the Level 3 CDN story.

The mini video portal has interviews with Level 3 executives, customers and features a whole bunch of case studies and shows logos from such customers as Netflix (NFLX), Microsoft (MSFT), Comcast (CMCSA) and Yahoo! (YHOO) amongst others. The videos provide a great insight into Level 3's entire CDN ecosystem including Vyvx and its broadcast operations services and it's great to see Level 3 really focus an entire website to its CDN offering. The new site is well thought out, provides answers to a lot of technical questions about their ecosystem and will be a valuable sales tool for Level 3 when pitching content owners.

By 2013, annual global IP traffic will reach two-thirds of a zettabyte, according to a new forecast of IP traffic issued by Cisco Tuesday. What is a zettabyte? It is a trillion gigabytes, dummy. (I had to look that up too). And that number represents more than a fivefold increase in IP traffic from today.

What is driving this growth is video. Cisco forecasts that 90 percent of consumer IP traffic (which makes up the majority of total IP traffic) will be video in 2013. Cisco also predicts that mobile data traffic will also be overtaken by video, reaching 64 percent of total mobile IP traffic by 2013. Part of this might be wishful thinking on Cisco’s part, which needs broadband usage growth to continue apace in order to sell its networking gear. But part of it is also the fact that these numbers are based on the percentage of bits traveling over those broadband pipes, and it doesn’t take a lot of fat video files to fill those up.

During his keynote at the Content Delivery Summit last month, Jeff Cohen, GM of Microsoft's (MSFT) Edge Computing Network gave out a lot of interesting data as it pertains to Microsoft's CDN business. While the theme of his presentation covered a lot of great topics, one of the points that really stood out was how quickly Microsoft is moving away from relying on third party CDNs for delivery and instead, using their own internal CDN. While this trend by Microsoft is something that has been widely known about to anyone who closely follows the CDN space, this is the first time I have seen Microsoft break out numbers that shows the split in traffic. (Note: Jeff's slides can be downloaded here, video of his presentation can be seen here)

Over the past two years, Microsoft has quickly started bringing a lot of its traffic for video, software downloads and small object delivery in-house. In 2007, third party CDNs delivered 95% of Microsoft's traffic. Based on Jeff's estimate, third party CDNs will only account for 40% of Microsoft's delivery business by next year.

Last month I completed my review of all the contracts and RFPs I saw in the market for the first quarter of 2009 and presented these findings at the Content Delivery Summit in NYC two weeks ago. (click on the video window for the presentation or go here here. you can download my slides here) Overall, pricing for delivery services from the major CDNs changed very little from Q4 2008 to Q1 2009, although some price erosion was seen at some of the mid-tier and higher level customers pushing a lot of traffic. (note: you can always find my latest pricing post at www.cdnpricing.com - Previous Quarters: Q4 08, Q3 08, Q2 08, Q1 08.)

While I continue to see a lot of analysts reports still talking about the "pricing pressure" in the CDN market, I still don't see anyone giving examples of what the "pressure" is. I think it is important to keep that in perspective as many in the market make the pricing declines sound bigger than they actually are. While Limelight did mention some pricing pressure with some of their largest customers on their Q1 earnings call, after the call they told me the pricing reduction for these customers was typically fractions of a penny, on per GB delivered contracts. While a company like Limelight has more exposure to pricing reductions since roughly 20 of their customers make up 50% of their revenue, fractions of a penny is not a huge drop in the market. And for customers who are already pushing a ton of volume and continue to grow their traffic, they expect to get some discount based on growth.

Level 3 Communications (LVLT) just had its annual meeting this week and it went very well.

Chief executive Jim Crowe, said the company's financial performance is on track to improve with increased cash flow and lower debt ratios.