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When Sling Media went live with a service provider to help it deliver large files worldwide, one of its Japanese partners was skeptical. The concern was that customers wouldn’t be able to download files as fast as they could when the partner hosted the files itself.
“They spent about an hour downloading files continuously,” from the new content delivery network (CDN), says Olav Phillips, director of technical marketing for Sling Media, in Foster City, Calif. “They were amazed. They didn’t think it would work as fast as it did.”
As he told attendees at the recent Network World IT Roadmap Conference and Expo in San Francisco, the decision to go with a CDN was driven by business realities. Sling Media was simply growing too fast, at one point signing up five new international partners within seven months. (Watch the video of our interview with him from the event.)
Sling Media makes the Slingbox, a device that IP-enables a consumer’s set-top television box. Users can transfer TV signals from their cable or satellite service across the Internet and watch shows anywhere they have a broadband IP connection. On the remote end, the setup requires a piece of client software – dubbed the SlingPlayer – that runs on laptops, smart phones and other mobile devices.
The trick was how to enable customers around the globe - the company has customers in 183 countries - to be able to download the SlingPlayer in a reasonable amount of time. Depending on the version, the code can be 40M to 70MB in size, and Sling Media comes out with new versions every two months or so.
Building its own data center infrastructure in various locations around the globe wasn’t a viable option for Phillips, who serves as the only full-time Web developer for the company. In Europe, for example, he says it may take two or three months to negotiate a bandwidth contract, and two to eight weeks to get a server. Sling Media simply didn’t have that much time, not with partners signed up in the United Kingdom, Scandinavia and various countries in Asia.
Partner Content
NetScout and analyst Jim Metzler have teamed to deliver a series of IT Briefs on Network and Application Performance Management leveraging research from NetScout’s nGenius & Sniffer users.
www.netscout.com
Metzler on CIO Priorities
The top five CIO priorities based on a survey of NetScout users revealing CIOs' top priorities and what they think they should be. Also includes interviews with CIOs of large organizations.
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Metzler on Application Delivery
How to eliminate the stovepiped or siloed nature of application delivery from both an organization and a technological perspective.
Read the Brief
Metzler on Network Troubleshooting
Overview of network troubleshooting that provides an assessment of where we are, and where we need to be relative to the complexities of today's IT challenges.
Read the Brief
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