Content peer groups fall flat
 
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Launched amid much fanfare a year ago, Content Bridge, a peering exchange pushed by Inktomi, and Content Alliance, a Cisco-led venture focused on developing technology standards for sharing content across networks, are going nowhere fast, victims of politics, competition and the tough economy.
Both groups have seen members go out of business recently, and Content Bridge operators admit companies today are focused on other, more pressing issues. "The economy has definitely affected the ability of all the participants to get together," says Kurt Merriweather, senior product manager of content delivery services for Digital Island, which took control of Content Bridge in July. He couldn't say when the group, which lists about two dozen members on its Web site, planned to meet next.
Content Alliance, which claims to have more than 100 members, is having a bit better luck as it continues to move ahead with its effort to develop open protocols and standards for routing content, delivering content and billing users as information traverses different networks. The idea is to enable content delivery networks (CDN) to act similarly to telephone companies, which routinely share networks to extend their reach.
Members of both Content Bridge and Content Alliance submitted drafts for proposed content peering technical standards to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in December. They are now working together in the Content Distribution Internetworking (CDI) Group.
But even as the CDI Group awaits its charter from the IETF and prepares for its next meeting in December, analysts say very little has been accomplished. They add that standards created by the group probably won't cause any impact for years.
"In the area of standards development [Content Alliance] absolutely trails the [content delivery] business," says Peter Christy, research director at Jupiter Media Metrix. "It hasn't facilitated the business. It hasn't been a great success or failure. There clearly will be standards. Cisco will support the standards. But at the moment the standards have no bearing on the business."
Content Bridge, meanwhile, launched its peering service in January, with companies such as Inktomi and AOL Time Warner touting the advance in sharing content across multiple networks. However, the effort seems to have stalled, in part because of the tricky politics of deciding who adds what value to the virtual network and as a result deserves what level of compensation.
Neither AOL nor Inktomi would comment on where things currently stand with Content Bridge. Exodus Communications, which reportedly had halted plans to offer the service, also did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
At the same time, Content Bridge's only resellers, Adero and Madge.web, have gone out of business, and Merriweather says Digital Island's CDN customers are the only customers using Content Bridge-developed technology today.
Apparently Content Bridge has become nothing more than an extension of Digital Island's peering strategy, says Melanie Posey, program manager of Web hosting at market research firm IDC.
"Content Bridge has become Digital Island, which has become Cable & Wireless. It's not a bridge anymore; it's part of a subsidiary of a global [telephone company]," she says. "What Digital Island wants to do is expand its network by reeling in new partners instead of going out and deploying servers everywhere the way Akamai [Technologies] does."
It was Akamai's approach, in fact, that initially spawned the idea of Content Bridge: To enable caching vendors and Internet service providers to get more out of their existing networks. The thought was that by banding together, those vendors and service providers could level the playing field. But, while Content Bridge idles, Akamai's network continues to grow. The CDN now has more than 13,000 servers in more than 1,000 networks in 63 countries.
"Content Bridge was just a way for all the other players who had been eating Akamai's dust to band together and get big enough to fight Akamai on a more or less equal footing," Posey says. "Now many of the content delivery providers have flamed out and the rationale has kind of disappeared."
In addition, CDN service providers such as Speedera Networks, Mirror Image and Akamai are focused on enterprise customers, many of whom opt to build their own CDNs, diminishing the need for peering. A study by HTRC Group found the demand for streaming would prompt this trend toward homegrown CDNs. The study found that 35% of companies do streaming and that 42% of them will in 2002. Of those companies doing streaming, more than half will build their own CDNs rather than outsource, the study concludes.
Nevertheless, analysts say the idea behind Content Bridge is still viable, especially for major telecommunications companies looking to get more revenue out of their networks, but the hurdles are many.
"In the beginning it was easy to get people to agree on the alliance because no one was making money," Christy says. "Suppose the thing started to be a way to make money. The questions are how do you divide it up, how do agree on who contributed what value to the equation and therefore how is the dime going to be divided?"
Even Digital Island is focusing more on its private peering efforts than on Content Bridge. Although Merriweather says the group plans to open itself to other caching vendors to make Content Bridge more attractive to service providers who may have incorporated non-Inktomi caches.
Still, Merriweather admits the most important focus for Content Bridge these days is its joint effort with Content Alliance in creating open standards and protocols for content delivery. Not that Content Alliance hasn't had its share of problems. Its newest member, NetVoice, joined the Content Alliance in March and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in October.
Overall, analysts say, neither group has had any real impact on the CDN world to date.
"At the moment, if you had to give [Content Bridge] a grade against original expectations, it would be at best only a D-minus," Christy says. "It's still around, but it doesn't seem to have done anything."
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