ChinaCache 2015 Earnings Down Due to Platform Issues
ChinaCache has finally released its earnings for Q4 2015 and they show a decrease in both quarterly and yearly earnings. Quarterly, their revenue was down 8.1% yearly to $48.1 million and their 2015 revenue was down 2.1% year-over-year totaling $209 million. Their yearly revenue loss was $13.7 million in 2015, a more than 10 fold increase over 2014’s losses. Founder and CEO of ChinaCache, Song Wang, attributes these losses to issues with their platform optimization, a project which they launched in July of 2015.
The cost of revenue was also significantly impacted with reduced bandwidth efficiency due to decreased net revenues and depreciation. ChinaCache’s one area of growth, it seemed, was in its adjusted EBITDA non-GAAP revnue, which increased 16.7% to $18.6 million in 2015. ChinaCache reports that they expect to complete their platform optimization in the first half of 2016 and did successfully launch their Cloud Data Center and Internet Exchange operations in 2015. They will be focusing this year, reportedly, on their “dedicated carrier- and Internet-neutral data center network (DCN) ecosystem” to generate revenue once their platform is fully optimized.
First EDM Artist to Live Stream in VR and 360 Video
Hardwell, an EDM artist on the award-winning Dutch record label Revealed Recordings, streamed his live festival performance in Miami beach in VR and 360 video on March 16. Hardwell is the first EDM artist to stream his concert live and it was the first performance available on all platforms; VR headsets, iOS, Android, Apple TV and the web. Littlstar, the New York based network focused specifically on immersive experiences such as virtual reality and 360 video and VBR, an Amsterdam based virtual reality broadcasting company that is a part of Scopic, who specializes in 360 video camera equipment built specifically for live UHD streams, worked together on this endeavor.
The CDN LeaseWeb was used for the stream due to its global reach and dynamic traffic bursting and adaptive bitrate streaming capabilities. The streaming and filming process at the show went excellently. However, Nikki Beach, the upscale beach on which the concert took place, was apparently not a fan of the EDM music festival.
During the artist before Hardwell, Dannic’s performance, the volume of the music was significantly decreased due to complaints from the surrounding residents. When Hardwell reached the stage soon after, the video stream’s many viewers enjoyed only a few live songs before the lights at the venue went out entirely and the concert was shut down. Though the concert was not what the artist and record label were hoping for, the technology seems to be ready for these immersive live performances.
AWS’s Tips on Selecting Service Endpoints
Like construction, congestion or road closures slowing down traffic for vehicles on a roadway, data transfers are affected by route maintenance and changes in PoP availabilities. During a download, should packets have to wait to be transmitted or get lost along the way, download times can quickly spike.
This typically occurs when there is a problem at a PoP along the route of transmission. The ability to both determine the shortest possible route for traffic and to route traffic around congestion and PoPs that are not performing correctly are vital to maintaining end-user and client satisfaction. The shortest physical distance may not always be the fastest route, so having network visibility is key to altering routing logic in real time.
These routing alterations can occur on both the client and service side of the equation. For changes on service-side routing through AWS CloudFront, clients receive a set of IPs that are the closest to the edge location. CloudFlare’s health checks are continuously performed on these IPs and DNS Failover ensures that networks are continuously altered to deliver the lowest-latency routes. Smart client-side routing is performed under similar protocol and servers search the network for the lowest latency endpoints. Smart DNS servers have the ability to perform this function, as do some HTTP, such as Kindle Fire web browser, Amazon Silk.
What Information Does the HTTP Archive Hold
The HTTP Archive began in 2010 as a project to gain insight on HTTP pages. Currently the site collects data such as the number of HTTP requests, waterfalls, the most popular image formats, and more on the top 500,000 URLs and the top 5,000 mobile URLs on iPhones. The data is collected using WebPagetest and has numerous sponsors such as Google, Mozilla, Instart Logic, and many others.
This year, the HTTP Archive increased its tested sites from the top 300,000 to the top 500,000 (based on their Alexa scores) and they hope to reach 1 million sites on both mobile and desktop platforms soon.
This increase in capacity was made possible due to upgraded hardware, new sponsors (Fastly and SOASTA mPulse), improvements in how content types were classified, the addition of new code to detect formatting on images, and the creation of both HTTP Archive Chrome, which combines Chrome and IE9 browsers, and HTTP Archive Android to extend mobile analysis to Android devices.