CDN market set to rise rapidly
Details
Joseph O'Halloran
| 22 May 2014
As the online video market booms, revenue from content delivery networks (CDNs) is projected to rise commensurately in 2014 by 19% year-on-year to $3.36 billion.

According to the CDN 2014 2017: Operations and Analytics report from AccuStream, there are a number of key drivers for this growth including user appetite for self-selected content, further accelerating linear broadcast, media and entertainment's transition into virtual paradigms.

Furthermore, the analyst predicts that the double-digit growth will carry on through 2017 thanks to bandwidth pricing stability expanding top-line while lowering costs of goods sold; marginal performance paybacks; value-added services addressing technological complexities such as accounts requiring quality, reach and security at scale, deciphering media formats, device fragmentation and monetisation tools that improve MRR; the onset of virtual video including live steaming, video-on-demand (VOD) and TV everywhere deployment.

In all, AccuStream calculates that by the end of 2013 the total commercial value of media and entertainment video (views and advertising), movie/TV files, music listening and downloads (such as self-hosting entities like Google and Amazon) stood at $3.35 billion. Of this, $1.05 billion (31.3%) was delivered through CDN contracts. Moreover, video viewing and advertising (combining self-hosted networks), TV/movies and music was found to account for 2.4+ billion gigabytes of data transfer, worth $1.6 billion in commercial market value (bandwidth and co-lo fees only).

The analysis also found that the CDN market is being led by Akamai Technologies, Limelight Networks, CDNetworks, ChinaCache, Mirror Image, Level 3, Highwinds, Cloudflare, Tata Communications and MaxCDN