Deutsche Telekom North America Head of Innovation Andres Jordan presents "Clash of titans: Telco's CDNs and digital media from creation to delivery" at WebhostingDay 2010.
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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The second of the afternoon keynotes delivered Thursday at WebhostingDay was given by Andres Jordan, VP Innovations, Deutsche Telekom North America.
The context of the presentation, he says, is that media is moving to the web, things are going to multiple devices, from linear to the menu system and on-demand, from analog to digital, from mass advertising to targeted marketing and a whole list of other changes that make this movement a major paradigm shift.
Since the iPhone launch, he says, AT&T (the device’s carrier in the US) has seen its demand for capacity increase 5,000 percent. This was meant partly as an illustration of the impact of the fast growing demand for video, one of the best illustrations of the impact new content paradigms are having on telcos.
Jordan says that what he can provide to the creators of media (movie studios, for example) is a huge audience, and a vehicle for distributing that media to that audience. Building a CDN is pretty key to the telco business.
Deutsche Telekom, he says, is launching a CDN with a layer of intelligence on top of it that makes it possible for content providers to sell their content, and for users to buy it, and for the system in between them to provide the tools for tracking the transactions (along with a variety of other functions).
He talks here about some pretty theoretical ideas about the idea of proximity driving relevance, and how that’s going to impact the way companies like DT try to get the network closer to users, but I’m not completely sure I digested it.
But the long story short is that the company feels it needs help in handling the massive appetite for content that is coming, and growing, and for which he feels we are unprepared to an extent similar to the way AT&T was unprepared for the demands of the iPhone. It is partnering to add some of the functions that customers of distribution want – things like video encoding, for instance.
He says DT is building a solution that makes content, the distribution, on-demand streaming and end-point analytics part of the same product (as an aside, he says this is something that hosting providers might be able to sell).
In concluding, he says that thinking of the telco as the “pipe” was the wrong way to look at it. He sees the network provider as “enabling creativity.”
Aside from the quick suggestion that hosting providers might be able to sell the end-to-end, content-contract-to-analytics CDN product, there wasn’t really a clear sense of what the opportunity for hosting providers might be. But presumably, the role would be in the part of the process where he described partnering with other providers to fill out the scope of services demanded by the distribution customers.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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