As preparations continue for this year's CDN World Summit event, taking place in London this September, we speak to Istvan Polay, Head of Customer Segment Management at T-Systems France and one of the key speakers at the event.


In your opinion how has the market for Content Delivery Network services evolved over the past year?
 
The market has experienced exponential growth in Europe, in terms of traffic, penetration, and market awareness. Besides pure traffic growth, broadcasters and IPTV operators have started to realise the opportunities out there in using CDN networks and technology.

Telcos are also entering the market – some larger ones do it on a bigger scale by offering their own (or licensed or resold) CDN services, while others concentrate on building this capability in their own territory to facilitate scalable content delivery.

Interesting times are ahead of us – market consolidation, battle of the right CDN strategies, role and choice of the telco players, and many other questions have yet to be answered!


How far do you think CDNs will continue to grow, given the inexorable rise in popularity of online video?
 
CDNs have a good chance to be the solution of choice for many media-related services – it can be the substitute for broadcasting and IPTV networks, and can deliver to any IP-enabled device. This trend is already visible on the market. The ‘CDN enabled’ share of the online content is growing rapidly, and media services available online are growing too.



Apart from online video, what other services do you think benefit from CDN implementation?
 
Application acceleration, gaming, e-learning, and other dynamic content types benefit the most from using a CDN.

Besides the technical challenges to overcome, there are some commercial and operational challenges too where CDN is an excellent solution – service expansion to other territories and user groups, other devices, and thus customer retention and acquisition are very important issues for our CDN clients. 



What are some of the major current challenges for operators of Content Delivery Networks?
 
CDN services are driven from two sides: the developers of new platforms/protocols, and the requirements of clients. The evolving HTTP-based streaming solutions are an important step forward, but CDN providers have to make sure they introduce a safe and stable platform, to avoid making the mistakes we have seen during the early implementations of some of these services – some with live services.  Delivering to mobile devices is also a more and more important issue on many levels, from coding through caching to streaming.

With the CDN services being more and more integrated into clients’ systems, features like very detailed and timely reporting are very important, as well as all security and conditional access methods that support the monetisation of the content.