Decisions, Decisions

With many variables in cost and service features to consider, choosing a CDN isn't easy. For NetRadio, the stakes in such a decision are high — the company streams upwards of 4.6 million aggregate tuning hours per month, according to Arbitron's most recent report. So NetRadio declined to take the leap with a single provider, choosing instead to test the waters.

"We started off with iBEAM maybe a year and a half ago," says Rick Hailey, chief technology officer at NetRadio. "At that time, I streamed [our content] through co-location facilities, also with InterVU, and then had iBEAM as a tertiary provider. Because we stream in excess of 40 terabytes a month, I didn't want to have all my eggs in a single basket."

Hailey says that with the size of the NetRadio listener base, his biggest concern was the ability for a CDN to handle the number of concurrent listeners for each of the NetRadio stations. "Because when tuning server parameters, no matter what Real or Microsoft says, it's difficult to get the servers configured so that they can handle in excess of 1,000 direct concurrent connections," Hailey says.

In addition, Hailey says it became clear that certain CDNs worked better with particular player formats. "The first generation was pretty much a split down the lines, where iBEAM had Windows Media Player and InterVU had Real, and things worked out pretty well," he says. Moreover, Hailey found the Windows Media Player to be "more stable than Real" in high-volume concurrent accesses.

However, when it came time to renegotiate CDN contracts, there were significant differences in the prices of iBEAM and InterVU, with iBEAM on the high end. "Since InterVU had already proven they could stream Real, which is more technically challenging than Microsoft, it was much easier to make the decision to move my Microsoft channels to InterVU than to move my Real channels back to iBEAM," Hailey says.

Interestingly, InterVU has since been acquired by Akamai, which is now NetRadio's primary CDN.

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