Mirror Image: An Old Dog Learns Some New Tricks
[Note: This sponsored interview was recorded at Streaming Media West 2013.]
People come to the Streaming Media conferences to learn what's new in the world of online video. Sometimes, they find an established company adopting a new direction. At the recent Streaming Media West conference, Mirror Image showed that it that it has transitioned from CDN (content delivery network) to DDN (dynamic delivery network. Charles White, Mirror Image's chief revenue officer, explained what that mean.
"DDN from our perspective is a next generation CDN. It's where we see the service level that we provide our customers needing to migrate towards," White said. "The most important piece is that we recognize that when one of our customer's customers comes and requests something from our network that there's a lot of intelligence and capability that can be added into that transaction that ultimately will yield a much better result for our customer."
By repositioning itself, Mirror Image is emphasizing the unique offerings it brings to customers, offerings that help it stand apart from competing services.
"We spend a lot of our time on is application logic. Application logic for us comes with several different variations, but ultimately what it's about is when a user comes and touches something on our network how do we learn as much as we can about that user and use that data to enable our customer's logic?" White continued. "For example, within the real-time bidding marketplace we use a lot of that type of data collection to enable our partners or our customer's dataset to be able to figure out where the best advertising is."
Scroll down to watch the full red carpet interview.
Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen: I'm here with Streaming Media West in Huntington Beach, California speaking with Charles White who is the Chief Revenue Officer of Mirror Image. Now Mirror Image has been in the online video industry, particularly the CDN Industry, for a long time. And at our streaming media shows obviously one of the things I enjoy the most is seeing what's new, there's always new companies but I also get really jazzed when I see an old company learning some new tricks and I think that's what Mirror Image has been doing.
Charles White: Yep.
Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen: So Charles as I said, you've been in it a long time, actually 16 plus years, right?
Charles White: That is correct, yep.
Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen: But you're sort of reinventing yourselves as instead of a CDN a DDN, a dynamic delivery network.
Charles White: Absolutely.
Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen: What does that mean?
Charles White: Well quickly DDN from our perspective is a next generation CDN. It's where we see the service level that we provide our customers needing to migrate towards. The most important piece is that we recognize that when one of our customer's customers comes and requests something from our network that there's a lot of intelligence and capability that can be added into that transaction that ultimately will yield a much better result for our customer. And where we've really been spending our time and reinventing ourselves is what is the additional logic, what is the additional requirements, what can we capture either from that customer or enable on our customers part to be able to make the best opportunity come out of that whether that's a localized advertisement or whether that's data collection for better targeting later on down the line or ultimately a better way to be able to deliver the right type of stream to the right type of browser on the right type of device.
Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen: So is the traditional CDN dead?
Charles White: Absolutely not. I believe that standard delivery is still a part of the marketplace that's out there today, unfortunately it's still something that is utilized by a lot of companies. But there's so much more that can be done today by enabling intelligence as a part of that handshake to be able to better yield the right results.
Erick Schumacher-Rasmussen: So what are some of those things that Mirror Image does that makes Mirror Image unique?
Charles White: So one of the biggest things we spend a lot of our time on is application logic. And application logic for us comes with several different variations but ultimately what it's about is when a user comes and touches something on our network how do we learn as much as we can about that user and use that data to enable our customer's logic. So example, within the realtime bidding marketplace we use a lot of that type of data collection to enable our partners or our customer's dataset to be able to figure out who the best advertising is-- advertisement is for that particular user in that particular location. And these are all things that our network has the ability to enable based on our customer's dataset and our ability to understand the user.
Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen: Okay. Let's wrap up by taking a look ahead. Where do you see the industry headed in the next year or few years in general and in specific where do you see Mirror Image headed?
Charles White: Yep. More self-service applications enabling customers to be able to do more on their own. Intelligence, as I mentioned before, is a critical part of every single transaction going forward because it's not just about being able to deliver bytes anymore it's being able to deliver the right byte to the right person on the right browser on the right device so that continues to be a huge part of it. And it's also to be able to provide the tools around the solutions to be able to allow the customers to simplify the steps that they need to do on their end whether that's as simple as adding encoding into a video platform or as complex as be able to create customized solutions for customers that utilize an API infrastructure to be able to put it right into a workflow that they have designed.
Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen: Excellent. Once again, I've been speaking with Charles White from Mirror Image. If you want to find out more about Mirror Image you can go to www.mirrorimage.com.
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