Client News
Highwinds
Contentinople: July 22, 2008
Technicolor Teams With Highwinds for Streaming
By Ryan Lawler
Less than one year after purchasing one content delivery network (CDN), Technicolor has decided to partner with another. By partnering with relative newcomer Highwinds Network Group Inc. , the company is adding live and on-demand streaming to its delivery services.
Technicolor, which is owned by conglomerate Thomson (NYSE: TMS; Euronext Paris: 18453), purchased SyncCast last year to bolster its solution set, adding content delivery to its suite of services. That buy was made to allow Thomson to offer services that stretched from ingest to encoding to physical and digital distribution.
There was only one thing missing: While Technicolor's delivery mechanism is built to handle large media downloads, with the help of FastSoft Inc. 's FastTCP Internet acceleration technology, it's not designed to deliver live and on-demand streaming. That's where Highwinds comes in.
According to Scott Dougall, SVP and general manager of Electronic Distribution Services (EDS) for Technicolor, the decision to partner with Highwinds came about for two reasons: the strength of its network, and the company's partner-centric focus.
The second part was key, as Technicolor didn't want to have to compete with a CDN on some higher-level services. "A lot of CDNs are trying to move up the value chain. We sit pretty high up on the value chain, so Highwinds was much less of a threat on one level," Dougall says.
Akamai is one example of a CDN player trying to offer its own end-to-end services platform. Recently, it announced partnerships with transcoding companies to allow media companies to integrate those services with its StreamOS media management platform.
For Highwinds, the announcement adds one more to the growing roster of partners that it has signed on through its "channel-centric" model of doing business. Last week, Highwinds announced it was also partnering with video platform provider CastFire.
That announcement came about just a few months after CastFire announced a similar agreement with EdgeCast Networks Inc. CastFire founder Brian Walsh says that both CDN agreements are non-exclusive, and that his company will continue to work with several CDNs.
