Nokeena targets CDNs with low-cost video delivery

Startup Nokeena Networks came out of stealth mode today with its first product, Media Flow Director, designed to lower the cost of online video distribution with television-like quality. It also announced its first customer, content publisher Break Media, which has deployed the software to support its online video delivery.

Nokeena's vision was to enable profitable revenue growth for online media providers through an open architecture that can ensure high quality of experience, according to co-founder and CEO Rajan Raghavan. As online content proliferates on PCs, mobile devices and increasingly TVs, media publishers and distributors are seeing explosive growth in traffic, but not in predictability on the network – and therefore, not in revenue either. To address this, Nokeena's software offers content publishers, aggregators and content delivery networks (CDNs) the ability to scale without the need for new infrastructure.

"We focus on providing an infrastructure for new media," Raghavan said. "That solution enables three value propositions – one is to provide a TV-like viewing experience at a dramatically lower cost. The second is to provide tools to augment the ability to charge more on a variety of factors, and third is to make sure it works with the existing media ecosystem. We are not so disruptive that people have to build a new infrastructure solution."

Media Flow Director, a one-server platform, can support up to 40,000 streams and 10 gigabits per second per rack unit. It can also support CDNs' and publishers' unique needs in multiple encodings, bit rates, file sizes, viewing platforms and delivery protocols and delivers media content consistently regardless of changes in network conditions or shifts in viewer demand.

The company attracted a lot of interest from telcos looking at how to approach over-the-top video at last fall's TelcoTV show, said Prabakar Sundarrajan, Nokeena's CSO and CTO. Telcos have the option of rolling out their own CDNs, but they can't do it with the functionality users have come to expect, Raghavan added. To appeal to these carriers, Nokeena focused on cost savings and manageability by deploying their platform close to subscribers rather than at the headend.

"They really needed something that was purpose-built for media, because most of the things they are really looking at are data and not media," Raghavan said. "Media is different. It's larger. We took a really deep level of media intelligence and looked at how to cache it and deliver it to different types of devices and optimized the network for delivery of media. It delivers a TV-like experience to consumers but does so at massive scale."