At the Streaming Media West show we met with Robinson Robinson, CEO of Velocix, one of the largest world-wide CDN (content delivery networks) companies.  

Velocix customers include Bollywood TV, where you can watch "Saas Bahu aur Sensex". The movie promo says it is a fun film about the changing face of India.  
 
Robinson explained how Velocix has taken the best elements of P2P (peer-to-peer), whereby bandwidth is increased as more and more computers start downloading a movie or watching a live broadcast. The big problem with P2P is that the ISP ends up having its bandwidth consumed. 

Velocix has integrated proprietary caching at both the "big pipe" network provider level and the "small pipe" individual ISP locations. All of these devices are under the control of a decentralised network management suite of proprietary applications. Next, it uses off-peak bandwidth. Robinson explained that the company manages this by having a world-wide network of locations interconnected to a very big fibre-based broadband pipe.  
 
Every browser was originally designed for the successful delivery of successive small objects (files) using HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the predominant markup language for web pages. Then, the browser was enhanced with a plug-in using Javascript, the scripting language most often used for client-side web development or CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), a simple mechanism for adding style such as fonts, colours and spacing to web documents. Over 95 per cent of Windows OS-based browsers have a Flash plug-in to assist with the multimedia software created by Macromedia and currently developed and distributed by Adobe Systems.  
 
Each of these enhancements to your browser allows differing individual effects to be displayed. Some can only run on the desktop, others will run on a mobile phone browser.  
 
Then there is the issue of how much download speed is required for the various resolution levels.  For Youtube videos, we can live with 320p resolution, which needs a download speed of about 300kbps. At the opposite end of the scale are full-screen, hi-res 1080p eye-popping movies and real-time live performances, which call for a download bitrate of between 6Mbps and 10Mbps.  
 
So what does that mean on your desktop when you want to watch a movie?  
 
If you're in Bangalore or San Francisco downloading a movie from Bollywood TV, you might actually be interconnected to multiple servers in several different time zones. Each of the locations has taken the movie and divided it into a series of standalone "slices". These slices are located at places where bandwidth is not in high demand and are priced at less per megabyte at that local time zone than where your desktop is doing the downloading.  
 
Not everybody lives in the country where an event is taking place. The Italian football (called soccer in US) club AC Milan has millions of fans all over the world, most of whom will not show up at an Italian or EU stadium to watch a game. AC Milan uses a subscription service based on Velocix technology to bring the excitement of its hard charging players into living rooms of my fellow Californians. The same is true of Bollywood TV putting movies onto the desktops of folks half a world away.  
 
Robinson said that Velocix can provide customers with the tools to do streaming video themselves with their in-house technicians and servers. Alternatively, Velocix can do it all for the customers, as a end-to-end delivery system with head end content delivered directly to nearly anyone with the proper bandwidth. Phil said that most of their customers like the subscription model, including BBC, Verizon Videos over fibre in the US, and Telecinco (Spain).  
 
Robinson said that the BBC has increased its TV viewing figures because viewers jump onto their computers and get up-to-date on a segment of a show they missed.  
 
Obviously streaming media is changing how we use our desktop computers and mobile phones. CDN is a necessary tool to get that high-quality video and audio out there to everybody. X