Written by Liz Gannes
Posted Tuesday, June 24, 2008 at 10:14 AM PT

 

AT&T Makes Its CDN Move

AT&T (T) today announced more details of its expected effort to enter the teeming content delivery network market, naming three software partners and saying it would spend nearly $70 million on network infrastructure before the end of this year. The move is an ominous one for smaller CDN companies.

The deep-pocketed telco giant, which had previously been an Akamai reseller, has two significant advantages: The ability to sell to its existing corporate customer lists, and the fact that it owns its own network. AT&T will be offering both on-demand and live video service with the help of software partners ExtendMedia (media delivery platform), Qumu (live webcasting), and Stratacache (caching and multicasting).

As Dan Rayburn wrote last month:

AT&T won’t go out of business in 18 months when the VC money dries up, like some of the other CDNs will, and the company has an enormous marketing budget, re-seller channel and plenty of R&D resources. That’s not to say those advantages will guarantee AT&T success, as we saw Qwest (Q), MCI, and other telcos in the market fail with these same advantages years ago.

As part of the move, AT&T said it has created a new business unit and named Cathy Martine executive vice president of content distribution. Martine had, among other things, previously led the company’s VoIP efforts.

Sphere
Topic: Distribution
« Previous Post Next Post »

Comments & Trackbacks

  1. [...] All StoriesWebBroadbandInfrastructureMobileVoiceFoundReadStructure 08Archives AT&T Makes Its CDN Move — AT&T today announced more details of its expected effort to enter the teeming content delivery network market, naming three software partners and saying it would spend nearly $70 million on network infrastructure before the end of this year. For smaller CDN companies, the move is an ominous one. Continue reading at NewTeeVee. [...]

    AT&T Makes Its CDN Move - GigaOM on June 24th, 2008 at 12:30 pm - Permalink
  2. [...] AT&T Makes Its CDN Move « NewTeeVee Tags: at&t, ngn, Broadband, [...]

    Anche i giganti evolvono? AT&T entra nel business delle CDN | VoipBlog.it on June 24th, 2008 at 2:13 pm - Permalink
  3. [...] that shut down is going to come next year, though I thought it was already killed, since the former AT&T Callvantage boss is now running AT&T’s CDN business, and we have not heard a single pitch from the company in over a year. I guess this is one less [...]

    No More AT&T Callvantage? - GigaOM on July 3rd, 2008 at 11:13 pm - Permalink
  4. [...] that shut down is going to come next year, though I thought it was already killed, since the former AT&T Callvantage boss is now running AT&T’s CDN business, and we have not heard a single pitch from the company in over a year. I guess this is one less [...]

    Yatching Newsly | No More AT&T Callvantage? on July 6th, 2008 at 2:09 am - Permalink
  5. [...] Storm Ventures, Garage Technology Ventures, Halo Opportunity Fund and the Angels Forum. We’d covered Qumu for its distribution deal with AT&T; it has also signed Polycom as a [...]

    Funding Odds and Ends: Qumu, GumGum, EatLime, Ku6 « NewTeeVee on July 21st, 2008 at 5:00 pm - Permalink
  6. [...] serious talks between Akamai and AT&T, but they didn’t go anywhere. AT&T is launching its own CDN efforts, though it is hard to tell if it had any impact on Akamai’s [...]

    Akamai Up On Idle Chatter « NewTeeVee on August 22nd, 2008 at 12:32 pm - Permalink

Leave a reply








Safari hates me

If your comment doesn't show up immediately, it may have gotten caught in our trusty (but occasionally overly ambitious) spam filter. Please drop us a note and we'll retrieve it.