Can you recommend an effective and cheap CDN for video streaming?

Question

I am looking for a streaming CDN recommendation. Cost and performance are my chief concerns. Video viewers may be all over the globe, with the, US, Europe, Russia and South America topping the list (yes, I know that leaves out a little :-).

I saw the following list of streaming CDNs in LinkedIn: Akamai, BitGravity, EdgeCast, Highwinds, Internap, Level3, Limelight, Mirror Image, Move Networks, Qbrick, SimpleCDN, StreamZilla, Swarmcast (streaming via HTTP), WINK Streaming... (+Amazon's S3 and CloudFront)

Can anyone recommend any of these or others? Or a different type of technology (e.g. P2P).

Answer 1

Here is a quick review of some of the CDNs I've personally looked at over the past 15 months or so:

• My company is currently using S3/CloudFront (for 'overflow' only) to our satisfaction and would recommend it for on-demand media.
• Interlake: We use them for some live streaming projects with great success.
• I've also taken a very close look (demo account, prototype integration, etc.) at Voxel.Net and was impressed.
• Oh, Akamai scared us away quickly with their relatively high costs
• We ruled out Cachefly.net because of prohibitive storage costs, although their traffic rates were fairly low. Maybe it is worth a look for you?
• Tata Communications (yes, that Tata) is making a big move in this market. They taken a different approach--fewer points of presence and network nodes by leveraging their dark fiber assets. Costs are competitive.
• I am personally skeptical about P2P streaming. It is or will be fraught with problems, both real and imagined. Some of the issues that I've read about include:
  • Consumer up stream costs by major ISPs. (Imagine getting an upstream bandwidth bill for watching content at the end of the month.)
  • Generic P2P copyright & caching F.U.D. (It's been around for years and may never go away.)
  • Quality of service issues and questions
  • It is difficult enough to get UDP-based streaming past corporate firewalls, let alone any sort of P2P technology
  • The BBC is one of the more visible, large organizations playing with it. If you want to learn more about the issues involved here, Google about for BBC P2P streaming. It is happening now, things are in flux.

Answer 2

A very good one (IMHO), and pretty good pricing: SimpleCDN

Answer 3

I do have an anti-recommendation. Back in April, an origin server we were using at Limelight started to have some problems, and we weren't notified about it. They didn't have current backups, so we lost a lot of our content (about 6 months worth). Worst of all, it took them 6 days to resolve the issue. Because we were evaluating them as the CDN for our platform which needs a high amount of up-time, we dropped them after this.

So far, working with Highwinds has been a good experience. They actually listen to feedback and suggestions for their product, and the performance has met our expectations. Their level of service has been excellent, and the pricing is reasonable.

Answer 4

We're evaluating CDNs right now and EdgeCast's content delivery network is looking like the leader. As mentioned in this thread, Akamai is very expensive. BitGravity just lost their CTO and seems to be in some trouble. Limelight has been OK but the EdgeCast people are more responsive, easier to get a hold of and respond to questions/requests. EdgeCast is about the same as Limelight pricewise but we're not done neogitating yet. That's my 2 cents. Darby

Answer 5

You can also try Amazon's EC2. It has both a East Coast and European data centers, which covers most of your customers except those in South America. Soon it will build a west coast data center. The beauty of EC2 is that you have full control over the machines. Thus you can deploy customized Web and Streaming servers in these machines. Also you can dynamically adjust the size of your server farm based on the demand, which can save you lots of money potentially.

We have been using both Level3 and Limelight. It seems that Level3 has better quality than limelight.

Also Move Networks is not a CDN. It provides streaming solutions and uses Limelight to deliver the content.

Answer 6

EC2 is not a CDN.

Currently, I think SimpleCDN is the leader in cost-performance for a CDN. Their Mirror Bucket CDN service is excellent.

Answer 7

What about CloudFront from Amazon?

Answer 8

StreamZilla offers professional support, high uptime, and a great dashboard. www.streamzilla.eu has prices, tech specs online. You can get a free demo. Their price may be a bit higher but you pay for quality.

Answer 9

We're using Mydeo - basically a reseller of the limelight network - so you get that scale and performance but with better service and prices

Answer 10

advection.net

great prices, API's

Answer 11

Wink streaming www.winkstreaming.com all the way

Answer 12

i suggest level3 they are pretty cheap.. i have tried highwinds recently their support went bad