CDNs Rush to Add High-Definition Flash Streaming

The company has also leveraged its online gaming delivery cache into the streaming space, noting that in October it delivered streaming video and games for the World Cyber Games.

"We organized and streamed our grand final event and other national operations from Seattle, Wash.," said H.S. Kim, CEO of World Cyber Games "to 74 countries and made the grand final available to our 1.5 million global WCG tournament participants.''

Limelight, which bills itself as "the leading CDN for digital media", announced it would immediately move select U.S. customers to a new platform that supports Adobe Flash Media Streaming Server 3.

"We are thrilled to be one of the first CDNs to make it available to our customers," said David Hatfield, Limelight's senior VP of sales. "It is important for us to continue to provide the latest technologies to our customers and partners . . . and we will continue to make [Adobe's] products an important part of our network."

Swarmcast also announced an HD streaming service for Flash early this week, with a player called Autobahn HD for Flash at the center of the announcement. The new player, which I had a chance to demo shortly after Streaming Media West, enables full-screen video while protecting against video stalls and skips. It actually streams two clips, one at non-full-screen and another at full-screen, fairly seamlessly moving between the streams as the user changes the viewing size (think of roundtripping for an iPod/iTunes combination, but in real-time and with streaming content rather than files).

Part of this is accomplished by forward error correction, in much the same way as the traditional satellite IP delivery systems or packet flooding in several of today’s video conferencing system. But in Swarmcast’s case, it takes advantage of peer to peer networking in what the company terms it’s Autobahn Accelerator, which "transparently accelerates video delivery" if the customer choose to use the Accelerator technology.