Motorola Mobility is filling a gap in its portfolio through a deal with content delivery network provider EdgeCast Networks, under which Motorola will offer the latter's CDN solutions to cable operators and other service providers worldwide.
The deal is nonexclusive, but other terms were not disclosed. Motorola, which plans to integrate the EdgeCast CDN software with its own video-on-demand, encoding and IP video products, now claims it has a highly scalable content delivery solution to go head-to-head with Cisco Systems and Alcatel-Lucent.
The EdgeCast CDN will let Motorola's service provider customers more efficiently deliver IP video to their own subscribers, by caching content closer to the edge of the network, said Jim Owens, director of product management for Motorola Mobility's on-demand video group. In addition, the solution will let MSOs and other network operators resell CDN services to content owners, he said.
Operators all want the ability to deliver video to multiple devices, Owens said, "but the forward-thinking ones are also thinking about, How do I get into the CDN market?"
Santa Monica, Calif.-based EdgeCast operates a commercial CDN with more than 4,000 content customers, including Lifetime Networks, LinkedIn, Tumblr and Yahoo, and claims to deliver more than 1.5 billion objects per hour.
Twelve carriers worldwide use EdgeCast's CDN platform, including Canada's Telus Communications, BT, Deutsche Telekom, Australia's AAPT, Telecom New Zealand and Pacnet in Asia, according to EdgeCast president James Segil.
Segil acknowledged that operators licensing the EdgeCast CDN will be potentially competing against EdgeCast's own services.
"We are enabling our own competitors, and we've been doing it for a number of years," he said.
EdgeCast's model is to work with its service provider partners to connect them into a federated CDN to let operators buy and sell capacity: "We want to make the CDN market look more like IP network capacity," Segil said.
Motorola's EdgeCast CDN solution includes installation, integration and support for service providers. Operators can choose a licensed-software model or a hosted model, in which EdgeCast provides.
The companies said the EdgeCast CDN platform will be integrated and delivered with products and software from Motorola Mobility's Home business, such as the M3 media server, VOD servers, encoders, transcoders, MediaFlow and DreamGallery.
Motorola is in the process of being acquired by Google in a $12.5 billion deal. Google reportedly is exploring spinning off the company's cable-focused business unit after it completes the takeover.
