Just came across this Associated Press news release, which claims VeriSign will "start distributing family friendly movies from AxiomTV early next year". Can you believe it?
As it turns out, the AP story was slightly misleading. The movie download service will actually be offered by VeriSign customer Axiom.TV. On Jan 8, Axiom will launch "the world's first family friendly and parental controlled Internet TV channel". Its "military-grade web-blocking technology" will protect viewers from porn, violence and vulgarity.
What VeriSign will offer is its Kontiki P2P content delivery service. The company says with P2P, content owners enjoy cost savings of approx 40%.
Since I hadn't heard of Kontiki before, I did a bit of quick research and found that the technology comes from a VeriSign subsidiary. Founded in 2001 by Netscape alums, Kontiki raised $42.6 million throughout the years before its $62 million acquisition by VeriSign in March 2006.
Amazon, eBay, Sony, McAfee, Ernst & Young and the Sundance Festival were all early customers. It currently powers video delivery for Adobe, Nextel, TimeWarner and CNet. What I found most intriguing was this 2002 press release about its grid delivery server software: "Kontiki's customers have created their own grids to deliver business video on demand to their sales force, channel partners, employees and customers."
When I first came across CoralCDN this summer, I thought P2P content delivery was a pretty new idea. Little did I know that the technology - as well as Kontiki's vision of delivering TV-quality video - has been around for ages! Coral's still pretty cool, though. Digg, Fark, Slashdot and a long list of other sites all use its free service.
I'm intrigued with the concept of P2P delivery with subscription control and usage reporting though.