Nov 29, 2001 12:00 PM,

Williams buys bankrupt iBEAM to enhance streaming strategy

Jim Barthold

A $25 million cash investment could help Williams Communications’ growth and evolution in an evolving transport arena. Williams spent the money to pluck iBEAM Broadcasting out of bankruptcy, acquiring assets such as facility and equipment leases, substantially all customer contracts and intellectual property, and gaining a piece that fits into its present transport strategy while paving a future route to IP streaming.

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“We’re looking at this whole acquisition as a way to accelerate our ability to get to scale faster in streaming,” said Greg Onyszchuk, vice president of Williams mediaXtranet initiative in its Broadband Media Platform Group.

For starters, Williams gets iBEAM’s base of blue-chip clients that provide “an excellent natural extension to the lines of business we’re already in with these clients,” Onyszchuk said.

In a couple of years, “we want to be well positioned for when consumer broadband and streaming to consumer residential applications reaches critical mass,” he said. “We’re very interested in being well positioned when that happens.”

Williams is not concerned that iBEAM failed to make a business of streaming and went bankrupt, because iBEAM was dependent on outsiders for key pieces of infrastructure that Williams has internally.

“We operate our own [33,000-mile] fiber-optic network,” Onyszchuk said. “At a layer above that, through our mediaXtranet initiative, we have a content-delivery network that’s probably of a capacity and scale that will stand against any other content-delivery network on the plant, and we have the ability to load all this IP traffic on that system.”

Thus, iBEAM has a great future, he said.

“Streaming will be very important in the long-term future of communications … in the next generation and iterations of the Internet and the evolution of business-to-business and person-to-person communications,” Onyszchuk said. “It’s important for us to participate in the streaming market and have a really excellent infrastructure for carrying streams.”