The CDN industry is an interesting place right now, as CDNs are partly responsible for disrupting many industries including security, broadcasting, OTT, OVP, ADC and others. In a nutshell, CDNs are global infrastructure companies that deliver content to the furthest regions of the world using innovative optimization techniques, similar to the way Google does it. In the security industry, old school security and CDNs are collapsing, as security functionality moves from proprietary hardware to the CDN Edge. The same is happening in the broadcast and the professional film-making industry, as Content Exchange and other cloud based services are disrupting the post production ecosystem. The ESPNs and HBO’s of the world have taken notice, and created new business models to accommodate the growing mobile audiences.
SDN+CDN in the Service Provider Market
Among the chaos, there is one industry that will be impacted by SDN+CDN, and that is the Service Provider market. And by Service Provider, we mean the last mile incumbent carriers that deliver VOD content to end users in their local markets (AT&T, Verizon, BT, DT, Orange, Telefonica…). SDN+CDN will also impact the CDN ecosystem, or at least those start-up CDNs that support video streaming on their networks. In fact, SDN+CDN has the ability to even the playing field between the Akamai’s and Fastly of the world. The entire video delivery chain from content creation to consumption will be disrupted, as last mile carriers might one day have the ability to copy and paste Netflix like infrastructure into their last mile networks.