Akamai Shows P2P Solution To Select Customers

Implications: While no official announcement was put out by Akamai recently about their P2P offering, in late November in Munich Germany, Akamai showcased some of it's P2P offering for a very small select group of clients and partners. Based on what some of those customers have told me, Akamai stated that P2P traffic will be priced lower than CDN traffic, but Akamai did not give out any pricing details.

Analysis:

Technical details of the service were not covered in depth, but those at the event were told to expect a technical white paper on the product within the next 60 days and were told that the P2P service will initially be limited to HTTP delivery only. No public launch date was mentioned for the service.

For me, seeing what Akamai does with P2P is important since they do have the most market share for video delivery and would be the first major non-hybrid CDN to deliver on an in-house P2P based service. With the number of video customers Akamai has, I'm eager to see how many customers are going to be willing to help push out a player to their viewers. If Akamai can get some of their major customers to do this, think Apple, then they could get some great traction for the player and give more valid exposure to the P2P industry.