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Akamai Up On Idle Chatter
Akamai, a leading content distribution network, saw its stock jump almost 6 percent to about $23.97 a share today, leading to speculation by some blogs that the company might be takeover bait. Prompting this talk is the company’s market capitalization of around $4 billion.
The whole fracas today is nothing more than a tempest in a teapot, and I am not putting much credence to this talk. Why? First, the stock has already started to come down. Secondly, today’s trading volume isn’t too different from an average daily volume of Akamai stock trading.
More importantly, Akamai has come through a really rough patch and is starting to move in the upward direction. The company management is loathe to sell and more acquisitive in nature. If you follow the industry long enough, like I have, then you know that there is a rumor a week when it comes to Akamai and Limelight Networks. The whole thing feels like one big circle jerk.
Regardless, this chatter brings up the big question: Who will buy Akamai? In the past there were some 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 business.
Given its interest, AT&T could come back to the table. Thinking beyond AT&T, other suitors for Akamai could include Level 3, Verizon, Comcast or some international telecom operators. Cisco, Microsoft and Google could throw their hats in the ring. Akamai has an enviable infrastructure and still remains a dominant player in the CDN business.
How Do You Rate NBC’s Olympics Coverage?
GigaOM is asking its readers to rate NBC’s coverage of Olympics on old & NewTeeVee. We thought it would be a good idea to put forth the poll to you as well. Your vote counts both here and at GigaOM — so make your voice heard!
RedSwoosh Founder to Leave Akamai
Travis Kalanick, who founded peer-to-peer digital file distribution network Red Swoosh and sold the company to one-time-rival Akamai in April 2007 for $18.7 million, is going to be leaving the company soon. His last day is going to be August 29th, though it is not clear what he going to be doing next.
I am not surprised Travis is leaving. Back in May 2008, Janko Roettgers asked the question, Whatever happened to Red Swoosh? There was some thought that RedSwoosh would provide P2P chops to Akamai’s CDN network, an important development as file sizes started to balloon. It is stillnot clear what Akamai has done with Red Swoosh
Furthermore, Akamai stock has nosedived since the Red Swoosh acquisition. On April 12, 2007 Akamai closed at $53.29 a share. The stock ended the day today, August 14, 2008 at $23.53 a share. It doesn’t look like Travis is going to be resting on his laurels. Whatever he does - his next startup should be fun and innovative. Stay tuned.
Photo Courtesy of Dweekly via Flickr.
Good-Bye TiVo, Hello Network DVRs?
The simplicity of the idea behind network digital video recorders is what makes them so powerful. Unlike buying a TiVo or some dedicated device (including poorly designed set-top boxes), network DVRs allow you to save your favorite television shows online and play them back whenever your schedule permits.
The fact that you can’t rip the videos and share them with others makes this an ingenious solution for copyright owners, too. Which is why I could never understand the opposition on the part of media companies to the network DVR idea that was being promoted by Bethpage, N.Y.-based cable operator Cablevision. Fox, Universal, Disney and others sued Cablevision in May 2006 to block the service. Had the media companies asked, Cablevision, could have easily made it impossible to skip ads, which would have been a win-win for everyone. Instead, it turned out to be one long legal battle.
But today that battle came to an end, with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overturning a lower court decision and allowing Cablevision to offer networked DVRs. Cablevision had appealed the earlier decision, arguing that the Betamax decision that allowed folks to tape videos off television and cable at home set a precedent for its service. Cablevision is obviously is overjoyed by the court’s decision. Public Knowledge, a not-for-profit group, in a statement noted:
This decision is a great victory for innovation, technological progress and consumers’ rights. The Appeals Court reversed a lower-court ruling last year that made an artificial distinction between a VCR or TiVo device located on a customer’s TV set and a remote recording system (RS-DVR) operated by a cable company. The Appeals Court properly found that copies of material buffered for a mere 1.2 seconds do not constitute a copy over which a customer or cable company could be sued.
MobiTV Says It Has 4M Subscribers — Is Growth Slowing?
The first time Paul Scanlan, co-founder of MobiTV, showed me his service at a friend’s barbeque in Sausalito, it was nothing but a herky-jerky video transmission of CNN on a Sprint handset. I had just moved back to San Francisco, and this was before the current investment cycle had started. To be honest, I didn’t give it much of a chance, and wondered who would want this service. Oops!
Five years later, the Emeryville, Calif-based company that got going in 1999 has grown tremendously. Today it announced that its mobile television service now reaches four million subscribers, though it is not clear how many pay for the service. MobiTV seems to defy the conventional wisdom about mobile video.
I decided to look at MobiTV’s subscriber growth over the years to measure the trajectory thus far. I also added the number of months it takes them to add another million users, and from that yardstick, it seems like the growth has started to slow down a little.
- April 2006: 1 million subscribers
- February 2007: 2 million subscribers (10 months)
- October 2007: 3 million subscribers (8 months)
- August 2008: 4 million subscribers (10 months)
Seeking Bigger Footprint, Qik Adds Windows Mobile Support
One of my long-standing beliefs is that we are going from communicating online to interacting online, and a key component of that big shift is easy availability of live video, thanks to the easy availability of broadband, 3G wireless and cheap cameras on cell phones. That is why start-ups such as Qik, Kyte, and Flixwagon that enable these live interactions are interesting to me.
Qik, a Foster City, Calif.-based company that we broke the story on last December, has become very popular with the blogger crowd, who have done a great job of evangelizing a service that so far has been available to owners of really expensive Nokia phones like the N95 (GigaOM handset review). Today Qik took first step towards becoming more egalitarian and announced that its service will now work on Motorola Q and Samsung BlackJack devices, both smartphones powered by Windows Mobile operating system. The Qik service is now in limited availability through an invitation-only alpha program.
At Structure08, Get the Cloud Computing Lowdown
We are inching close to ourStructure08 conference and are trying hard to round out the speaker list and the agenda. Our friends at Techcrunch wrote nice things about the upcoming conference on their blog today. I have been spending a lot of time researching the topics so we can make the event more fun and informative. The conference will be held on June 25, 2008 at the Mission Bay Center in San Francisco. More details are here. For ticket sales, click here.
YouTube Offline for An Hour
YouTube, like the iPod, has become a cultural phenomenon and part of our online lives. From politicians to pointless singers, everyone knows and uses YouTube. And that is why when the largest online video site goes down, it is major news. Of course it results in all sorts of rumors - DNS hacks, domain expirations or aliens landing on the roof of YouTube office (OK I made the last one up).
Actually the explanation might have been less exciting and proved to be a plain old technical snafu of sorts. A YouTube spokesperson said the service went down for an hour due to internal technical issues, and the problems have been fixed.
YouTube like many large consumer websites continues has had a history of outages. Check out the Pingdom page and get a good idea about YouTube’s track record so far. YouTube’s performance seems to have progressively improved since Google acquired the company for $1.6 billion back in 2006. YouTube receives about 10 hours of video per minute, and serves up terabytes of data per second. I will post an update later in the day.
Telcos’ TV Slowly But Surely Doing Better
Thanks to some generous support of their pal, FCC Commish Kevin Martin, and others at the state level, the big bets made by AT&T and Verizon on video — in the form of U-verse and FiOS, respectively — are slowly beginning to pay off. Last week, AT&T reported that it added 148,000 new U-verse subscribers in the first quarter, taking its total to 379,000. Ma Bell hopes to have a million subscribers for its U-verse service by end of 2008.
Today Verizon says it added 263,000 new FiOS subscribers in the first quarter of 2008 for a total of 1.2 million FiOS TV customers. Funnily enough, their presence is causing all sorts of problems for traditional TV providers, the cable and satellite guys. This is resulting in negative advertising campaigns, that while full of hyperbole, are amusing nevertheless.
Video Bumps Cisco Router Sales
It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but the online video boom is helping Cisco Systems sell a lot of its top-of-the-line CRS-1 routers.
The San Jose-based router and switch maker said that the total global cumulative shipments of CRS-1 Routers have doubled in less than nine months, rising from a total of 900 units shipped through June 2007 to more than 1,800 units shipped through March 2008. This shouldn’t come us a surprise. It was back in June 2007 that irst signs started to point to video (any kind of IP video) as the savior for Cisco.
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