Lights. Camera. Streaming

The Internet cloud is more like a funnel cloud producing a tornado.

Objects are sucked into a gloomy abyss before being relocated possibly hundreds of times, smashed into rubble, lost forever or if they're lucky, go untouched.

The uncertainty is a dismal scenario for streaming content, which requires precise delivery in order to be of reasonable quality. Packets can't be bounced around 17 router hops, arrive at different times or get lost a couple blocks from their destination.

Solving that problem is the major goal of Internet service providers and anyone involved in streaming content. And companies using satellite capacity are claiming to have found the eye of the tornado, where content can reach the edge without doing the marengue.

Edgix and Akamai through Cidera and Loral are just two companies using satellite capacity to deliver streaming content to the edge, an Internet service provider, to eliminate packet loss, congestion and randomness associated with the Internet storm cloud.

"We improve the quality of the experience for the end user," says Abhi Chaki, vice president of business development for Edgix. "Today the biggest issue is that these guys are saying, `I'm spending $40 a month on DSL, but I'm not getting the quality of broadband experience I am paying for.' So, the biggest issue with ISPs is not being able to live up to the expectations they have set for broadband. Edgix comes along and says don't worry by moving all this high quality rich media to the edge of the Internet, your customers can get a much higher quality of experience they haven't received before. You'll see less churn and you'll be able to add more customers."

Betting on cache Edgix isn't concerned with live streaming content and basically refuses to host live content because the quality of its service is geared toward caching content at the edge.

"If you look at streaming and streaming efforts or problems that people are trying to solve, most of the problems actually have to do with live streaming," Chaki says. "For example, a Victoria Secrets stream or the Drew Carey Show or Woodstock or something. Not a whole lot of people are actually watching those kinds of streams. Most of the content delivery networks, guys like iBeam, Akamai and Digital Island, those guys are focused on solving the problem of how do we enable live streaming better on the Internet. The issue is that is not really a big problem identified today. The streaming that people watch the most today are on-demand streams, which means it's the trailer on Film.com or a CNN clip. Those are the kinds of streaming that people are interested in, not the Drew Carey show."

ISPs purchase Edgix service and servers in order to receive content that doesn't lose packets or experience jitter while bouncing around router after router. Edgix takes requested content and delivers it via satellite to all of its paying ISPs in a multicast model.

That means that when users access streaming media through an Internet connection, the video clip or sound clip travels through the last mile to their PCs. No router hops. No lost packets. Less jitter. Better picture or sound quality.

"If you look at any Web content today, you dial in your ISP and from the ISP you go to the origin content at Yahoo.com or whatever and it goes all the way from the backbone and it gives you the content," says Edgix president and CEO Rangnath Salgame. "The next guy comes in and goes to the same object and again it goes through the backbone and gets the object and delivers it to the end user. What Edgix does is bring all the content to the edge, so all the content is preloaded into the node of the ISP. So when you dial in or go through your ADSL network, your ISP's network already has the content you're going to look at. Now you get content delivered at the last-mile speed, which is significant because most of the congestion is in the backbone, not in the last mile."

Although Edgix is not really concerned with live content at the moment, the future may lead the young company to make room for that possibility.

"Our value proposition and our streaming solution is not geared toward live streaming, but it's only focused on on-demand streaming," Chaki says. "We will do live as it gets more popular, but today's needs are for a very high quality on-demand stream and nobody else can do that."

To the edge by any means necessary Instead, companies like Akamai are taking on live streams and lighting up Internet records in the process. Akamai streamed more than six terabytes of content during Steve Jobs' MacWorld Expo keynote to more than 95,000 Web visitors. More than 4.3 Gbps of video were streamed at broadband rates to more than 21,000 simultaneous viewers during the peak of the Web cast.

Akamai also streamed content for CNN's U.S. presidential election coverage. In fact, Akamai does all of CNN's streaming content.

Unlike Edgix, Akamai sells its services to content creators who want their content to be close to the end users. Akamai accomplishes this feat by placing servers at ISP locations, which are given the servers at no charge. But these servers and services aren't restricted to just live content or video-on-demand content. Either is quite achievable.

"There's two streams we support, live and VOD," says Troy Latimer, of Akamai network architecture. "VOD is a lot like our static Web pages, where there's content sitting on a storage server somewhere of 300 [kbps] video. We even have a lot of 700 [kbps] videos, full two-hour movies that are like 500 megabytes. If you're going to watch that for the first time you come into your ISP and we have an Akamai server on your ISP, then all that video gets cached out to that. If you watch an hour, only an hour of that video is cached. The next person comes in and watches the full two hours, now the full two hours is cached at the edge. Then, whoever comes in after you, gets it right there.

"The live is a little different and you're coding right now and sending it out. We built a reflector network. This reflector network will take an entry point, the encoder sends it to an entry point in a scanning server, and pushes it out three to six times, so it's actually sitting on a network, waiting to go to the edge. That live feed is cached at the ISP, so you have a live feed for whoever wants to come in."

The benefit to using Akamai is that satellite capacity isn't its only form of transmission. Akamai began as a terrestrial-only service, but recently signed deals with Cidera and Loral Cyberstar.

"Those agreements are with organizations we believe are going to be doing 85-90 percent of the streaming on the market," says Bob Marggraf, chief operating officer of Cidera. "In the Akamai agreement, there are some 350 public locations we're working on between now and the end of the year and 1,500 toward the middle of next year to support their streaming."

That gives Akamai a complete delivery system that allows it to take the quickest route from the content providers to its servers at the edge.

"We have a software technology that can actually intelligently sense the traffic levels and see if it makes more sense to deliver it via satellite or terrestrial," says Akamai director of network strategy Peter Papavasiliou. "We're not going to send a stream unless somebody requests it. So, we're not going to eat up a lot of bandwidth."

Equiping new services Inktomi and InfoLibria are just two companies that provide caching servers to these companies and ISPs that will allow that content to sit at the edge.

Inktomi, which has its roots in the terrestrial side of Internet caching products, signed a deal with Edgix to provide all of its caching servers.

"There are two main components of Inktomi and it always falls under Internet infrastructure," says Miles Kelly, product marketing manager of Inktomi. "Under this umbrella we have two main divisions. One is portal services which is where Inktomi grew up and kind of powered the queries under search. Many major portals are using Inktomi technology to satisfy queries that their end users are making. Under network products, which currently represents about 70 percent of our revenues, is really where this Internet infrastructure component is at its strength.

"Within network products there are three main components. Standard Cache, which is known as a traffic server. Traffic server is the cache that is sitting in front of every one of the AOL requests. Every AOL request passes through an Inktomi cache. In addition to traffic server we have a product called content delivery suite, which is if you think of caching as reactive and it requires an end user request. The third component is Media IXT and we recently required fast forward networks."

Inktomi's servers sit at the edge of the Internet so that Edgix can store its content for end users to grab for a last-mile transmission.

But Inktomi is not alone in caching server industry. InfoLibria, which gears its products toward satellite distribution, has built a number of servers for companies to purchase. It has a created multiple products that enable an entire content delivery network via satellite.

"Let's suppose you didn't have this product and you wanted to deliver these streams," says David Lerner, director of satellite marketing for InfoLibria. "Typically when a person hits a Web site and this is a typical number for someone in the U.S., you have about 17 router hops. We have some people working at Boston University about five miles from here. I think we counted 27.

"In the most ideal case, they put it all the way out and it's one hop away, but it turns out that the streaming protocols have a certain tolerance for router delays. You could probably put it two or three hops back even and be feeding a network that the user is coming in on."

Streaming into the future The beliefs of what might happen in the future are as different as the ideas these companies are currently putting on the market.

Some say the Internet is the TV of the future, while others are claiming the Internet is supplemental to TV, while even others say it depends. No matter which direction the Internet goes, streaming will be affected.

Convergence of TV and the Internet is the mainstream view today, one that Kelly adheres to.

"We have a long ways to go," Kelly says. "One of the big topics at a lot of these conferences is convergence. When is the Internet going to make you cry? When is it going to make you derive emotions? As a skeptic, I think it's going to be a long time before I plop down and watch TV over my Internet connection. The interesting thing though is the infrastructure and the demand is going to drive toward that and Inktomi is very well positioned for that to happen. We're taking interim baby steps, one's that need to be taken.

"Eventually there will be just this one pipe and I agree with that. There will be such blurred lines between the content that's coming over your television and the content that's coming over your PC. Eventually if you get to TV quality, it's all streaming."

But there is plenty of room for other thoughts such as supplemental TV-like programming over the Internet.

"We have audiences in the United States that cannot get information via TV," says Marggraf. "They can't get the Korean channel. They can't get the news out of Taiwan, spoken in Taiwanese, by a local provider. I think what you're going to see is a lot more streaming going on live out of International content coming back into the ethnic communities in the U.S."

Finally, there's the safe route, one that is built as it needs to be driven on.

"I think the future of streaming depends on a couple of things," Chaki said. "A. getting the ability to provide streams at the same quality to a global audience, which is a big challenge. The second challenge is how do you get people from passively watching streaming to getting them to pay for streaming. What you will see Edgix doing is providing innovative solutions to both of these problems."