FastForward movement

Content may be king on the Internet, but so far, it's been a struggle to fill the royal treasury. The choppy quality of most webcasts makes them hard to watch, and an uncertain audience erodes streaming media's ability to generate advertising revenue and fees for delivering content.

FastForward Networks has produced a technology to solve both those problems, allowing ISPs to manage the flow of audio and video over networks while giving them a glimpse into streaming events to track the quality of live streams.

"We don't make software, and we don't make servers," said Eric Wolford, vice president of product marketing for FastForward. "We make the stuff in the middle, a new breed of technology that operates at the application level to provide one-to-many broadcasting with full robustness, reliability, manageability and control."

Because there was not a networking solution to the distribution problem, early multicasting efforts daisy-chained servers to one another - TCP connection to TCP connection - allowing them to interface. But these server trees were statically configured; a break in the tree interrupted service to the end users below that server.

The FastForward Broadcast Overlay Architecture suite consists of three products. The first is an adapter installed on the same server as the streaming delivery software. The adapter communicates with the FastForward Mediabridge, a software package installed on a separate server that helps route and distribute live media content. If packets are lost in the transmission from Mediabridge device to Mediabridge device, a hop-by-hop algorithm detects what's missing and retransmits only those packets. They then are reassembled at the edge and fed clean into an edge server, which distributes the content to end users.

Using that Mediabridge network, content can be injected at any edge without having to be backhauled to a broadcast center.

FastForward also incorporates a management tool that watches the whole network and lets the service provider track and control the quality of live streams.

On top of the management and control functions, FastForward offers a window into the broadcast that lets a content delivery network or ISP see what's going on, stream by stream, hop by hop, end to end.

They also can find out what end users are doing with their programs. "You know who's watching what program and how long they've been watching - not their identity but what IP address - and that allows you to get a real-time Nielsen-like measurement program by program," Wolford said.

America Online, Inktomi, RealNetworks, Enron Broadband Services and Sun Microsystems are among the content networks that have invested in FastForward. RealNetworks has been using the software since March, and Digital Island has just announced an agreement to deploy the Mediabridge adapters on all the streaming servers in its network and to deploy the broadcast management tools.

"This will allow [the companies] to manage the quality of service that they are delivering to their customers, the content producers, and to ensure that all their customers are getting what they paid for instead of... settling for whatever the Internet can deliver," said Alan Saldich, director of business development for FastForward.

FastForward is also in trials with one of the major backbone carriers. "We have a fairly large market opportunity with ISPs because FastForward technology will allow ISPs to peer not only with content distribution companies but potentially with each other," Saldich said.

AT&T, which recently announced its intention to build a high-capacity content distribution market in the next 18 to 24 months, would be a likely candidate for such peering technology. "We have a pretty good understanding of what they're up to and have always viewed them as a potential customer in the fairly near term," Saldich said.

FastForward may be able to bring something unique to the problem of content distribution on the Web, said Jennifer Rubin, analyst for Slomin Hayes Partners. "Their networking approach to the problems of content should appeal to the next generation of content distribution networks - and may help them make money at it," she said.