Case Study: Making a "Stickier" Cinema Site

EdgeCast Networks, Inc. offers a global content delivery service to provide customers competitive advantage in the delivery of digital media. The Los Angeles-based company’s content delivery platform, launched in August 2007, provides customers like IMAX and iLaugh the cost benefits and flexibility of controlling their own CDN without the bother of bandwidth contracts, capital investments, or operational concerns.

The Solution
If you ask president James Segil, EdgeCast’s relatively short corporate history—the company was founded in 2006 and launched its services to the market in August 2007—is a competitive advantage. "ISP networks have evolved so much, and we’ve been able to learn from their consolidation," Segil observes. Other CDNs who have been around longer, like Akamai, are to some extent tied to the legacy ISP infrastructure, requiring many points of presence to provide speed and quality, he says. Because of ISP consolidation that has taken place over the past decade, Segil says, "When we started building out the EdgeCast network it was possible to just connect to the main ISP peering points and use a more centralized architecture to deliver an even more powerful CDN."

It was that infrastructure that delivered the page speed and quality that Chattaway and his team were looking for. "We needed page load time to be fast, and with EdgeCast we were able to load pages in less than one-third of a second," recalls Chattaway. As important, if not more, was the fact that EdgeCast treated Jaman as a valued customer from the start. "I think with us Jaman felt like a big fish in a small pond," says Segil, noting that both companies were in the early stages and provided strategic help to one another. Chattaway remembers that "we helped make EdgeCast’s APIs more open, and they helped us make ours more generic."

Segil characterizes Jaman’s evaluation team as technically savvy. "They were very prudent and did lots of testing on global end-user experiences, redundancy, and rollover sites. They identified issues ahead of time" to minimize the chances of problems at launch and were open about communicating back to the EdgeCast team. As a result of Jaman’s feedback, Segil says, his company improved its own product documentation and made changes to its Control Panel function.

The extensive testing paid off for Jaman when it came time to implement the new CDN. "There were two weeks of development time," says Chattaway, "and then another four hours of testing integration. As for going into production, that took all of five minutes," and suddenly visitors to the Jaman website were automatically routed to the EdgeCast servers closest to them.

The Outcome
Chattaway has been pleased with the impact of the EdgeCast CDN, noting that the biggest impact has been for the more remote customers. "Outside of the U.S. we have seen pages load up to ten times faster than before, and our ‘stickiness’ has doubled across the user base," meaning that visitors to Jaman are hanging around twice as long as before. Quantitative performance measures also found that objects on the Jaman webpages load 88% faster than prior to the implementation of the EdgeCast CDN.

Of course, as a company whose success is intricately tied to the speed of its content delivery, Jaman isn’t giving its CDN provider a pass just because they landed the business. "One thing we learned in the process," says Chattaway, "is that the competition among CDN providers is intense. It’s very easy to make the CDN work for you." To ensure that EdgeCast stays on its toes, Jaman plans to re-evaluate its CDN provider at least every 3 months.

But Chattaway also notes that the very competitiveness of the CDN market means that vendor success comes down to small things. "EdgeCast gives us great reporting and service," he says, and that may be exactly the value-add that the small company needs to be a blockbuster.