Dan, in your coverage of Akamai's HD announcement, this is what you wrote:

<Today, Akamai held their live webcast to talk more about their HD video platform announcement from this morning and worst of all, the actual webcast stream itself didn't work well in Flash. I got lots of buffering, almost never got more than a 398Kbps stream and even though I am on a 25Mbps FiOS line, many times, Akamai's network estimated my bandwidth to be only about 1.2Mbps. Clearly not the impression Akamai was looking to give folks.>

Dan, I kept looking and looking for the performance you said you experienced, but only once, when the scene transitioned from one segment to another, did I see a hint of hesitation. All the rest was like watching TV — no halting, no buffering. My OS is an older Mac OS (Tiger) with no Intel, and I never upgraded the memory with which it came. To watch Akamai's webcast, I had to use Flash because my OS is so old I cannot install Silverlight. With those limitations, the performance on my screen was superior to that on your screen, so I have to conclude your problem was specific to your particular connections, not to any lack on Akamai's part. You have been in the business long enough to know mileage's vary in accordance with individual circumstances. Yet you did not mention that but, instead, you misled your readers and denigrated Akamai.

Your 'report' continues with:

<. . . Today, Akamai is still the largest CDN for video delivery based on traffic and revenue, yet they don't act like it. At a time when Akamai needs to be building their CDN business, their revenue is declining and they continue to lose market share. The market has shifted and Akamai refuses to shift and adapt to it.>

Why do you blame loss of market share on some 'shifting market' thesis? Does the near-depression economy not exist in your CDN world?

More:

<. . . Instead, they spend a lot of time and effort to put out out a release and produce a webcast that gives us lots of marketing fluff. No real details, no real answers, no real vision. . . . they seem to have lost all their vision for the CDN industry and their product offering.

While Akamai is a bunch of smart technology folks, it seems no one at Akamai can price, package, productized, market and sell their CDN services anymore. . . . Ask yourself, when you think of Akamai's CDN service for video, what message comes to mind? The "edge" story? The number of servers they have? That they are the biggest CDN? Where is their message? It doesn't exist.>

Well, Dan, not only did Sagan and Leighton REPEATEDLY mention their number of servers, they also repeatedly emphasized that it wasn't the number that was significant but the location of those in about 750 major cities and in some additional cities. Perhaps what you really didn't like was their contrasting their Edge locations to a few data centers? Which CDN(s) use data centers instead of Edge locations?


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