State of CDN Services

Sponsored By: Akamai

Streaming Media magazine and Unisphere Research, along with key sponsor and research partner Akamai, set about to gauge the State of CDN Services. We asked survey respondents to provide details of both their viewing habits as well as their assessment of CDN services, both in terms of expected terabytes served and CDN features. 

Our research centered on industry experts, media engineers and executive management, so we asked questions that provided insight into both the actual and intended uses of CDN services.  We found three primary results: Our survey takers tend to be fragmented when it comes to primary media consumption devices, tend to work for companies that either deliver less than 1TB or more than 100TB of online content per month, and are almost equally concerned with pricing in CDN service models as with the need to maintain multi-screen delivery to existing and emerging media consumption devices.

Some key results of the study include:

• Laptops are still the most dominant form-factor for primary online media consumption, and the combination of desktops and laptops still make up 46% of primary media consumption for our survey takers. Tablets (19%) barely eke out third place against the oldest media consumption device on the list: television ($18%).
• A full 92% of respondents said that content quality is important or very important to their overall online viewing experience.
• Multi-screen/multi-device delivery is far and away the number-one functionality that survey respondents look to their CDN provider to deliver on.