A Partnership for Our Video Future

Two industry veterans team up to deliver high value content over infrastructure that can handle next generation bandwidth requirements.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [September 29, 2008]

As services become more complex, no ISP can provide them alone. Your job as an ISP leader is to determine which companies are the right ones to work with.

Today's story is about two companies that are working together to serve the largest providers, the telcos and MSOs. The scale of this operation makes it different from what you will be doing, but the changes in internet usage that are driving this partnership are changes that you too are experiencing.

Buffalo, N.Y.-based Synacor and Atlanta, Ga.-based Internap are teaming up to deliver premium content to the majors' subscribers.

Content
Synacor is the content provider here. The company has agreements with content providers such as Major League Baseball, Encyclopedia Britannia, MusicNet, Astrology.com, and Dow Jones.

"Our product is a brand neutral portal that integrates with the MSO or ISP, using their name and brand and look and feel," explains Adam Howell, Synacor's director of networks and systems operations. "We bundle our premium services and content and deliver a single sign on service. DSL and cable subscribers now have a home page that is known as our portal, with direct access to streaming media, video games, sports statistics, and more."

Howell says that Synacor now delivers 4.2 million e-mails per day (out of 20 million incoming, with much spam blocked) and delivers 15 million page loads per day. He says that Synacor's service provider partner needed to be able to handle bandwidth-heavy content.

"Some content is stored and hosted by us, and sometimes the user is diverted to the premium content provider," he explains. "Anything that could have an adverse affect on the portal is delivered over a different network."

Infrastructure
Internap provides the application hosting, IP network, and content delivery network (CDN). Internap now has 44 data centers and a growing route-optimized Internet service and CDN. It purchased a CDN called VitalStream last year and announced that it had integrated the CDN into Internap's P-NAP architecture.

P-NAP stands for Private Network Access Point. Jim Leach, Internap's vice president of marketing, says that Internap's mission has been to fix the internet ever since the company was founded in 1996. It developed software to monitor the performance of backbones around the world and to select the best path for critical traffic.

Today, the company describes the P-NAP service on its website as "an innovative way to route data and avoid the internet's points of congestion. Rather than provisioning traditional single ISP network access, the Performance IP service intelligently routes across up to 8 integrated NSP networks in its Private Network Access Points (P-NAPs). This insulates your traffic from the risk of network outages, providing reliable, stable and predictable connectivity."

Leach says that the company delivers a backbone triple play of internet service, CDN, and data centers to 3,700 corporate customers.

He says that ISP customers are demanding higher quality infrastructure because traffic is changing. It may not be changing at the speed that some claim. It's not going to overwhelm the internet. It's not doubling every year, but it might be growing by a third each year. That's enough to create a demand for the specialized infrastructure that is Internap's specialty.

The trends that drive our decisions
"In the past, the internet industry was primarily about eyeballs," Leach says. "As broadband is increasingly available in the U.S. and worldwide, a trend is emerging, a shift to content instead of eyeballs. We are constantly thinking about how to build the applications and the network to support the new content, which is primarily video.'

Howell says Synacor sees bursty demand and needs a provider like Internap who can deliver a gigabit if there's a new Britney Spears or Sarah Palin video.

Some demand is predictable. "The day after Thanksgiving, the load is double the day before Thanksgiving as people go shopping."

Howell points out that e-mail is important to customers, both business and residential, and is a major component of Synacor's service. Like many ISPs, Synacor's clients have fewer business than residential customers, but those business customers demand reliable e-mail.

While Leach points out that worldwide, bandwidth is increasing at a manageable rate, Howell notes that if you're a rapidly growing ISP, you can double your bandwidth requirements if you add a sufficient number of customers. He says that Synacor's bandwidth requirements have doubled every year over the past four years.

Will the internet replace the television as the cell phone is replacing some land lines? Not immediately and not completely, but it is happening for some people. Leach says that he just purchased a flat screen TV with an Ethernet port. He's waiting for the HD cable hookup but has already connected the TV to the tinernet. "So while we're waiting for the cable to be set up, we're watching movies on hulu.com with our seven year old and our ten year old."

The bottom line, Leach says, is this: "the network that connects servers around the world breaks from time to time. So you combine intelligent networking, a CDN, and solid data center infrastructure, and you can deliver these new rich media websites and applications."

— End