The explosive growth for on-demand and increasingly real-time online content is exciting for the digital media sector and, no doubt, a reason why technology heavyweights such as Google and Apple have entered the market. With such rapid growth by users to view more content online and in real time, an intriguing battle within the Internet world is fast emerging. However, with a rush by content owners to capitalise on the opportunity and with many experts predicting the trend to continue for premium quality content to be delivered online, how can content owners, publishers and content distribution networks (CDNs) manage this increase and maintain the highest level of content availability and performance?
The answer may surprise many, as until recently, the thought of placing valuable digital assets with a third-party colocation data centre was unthinkable. But with an expanding digital media market that is already fragmented with content producers, publishers and aggregators of online video, gaming, social media, news and music, as well as content distribution providers such as ISPs, CDNs and broadcasters.
The pressure on the market is huge to supply the demand for compelling online content across a growing number of mediums including television, PCs, laptops, mobile, games consoles and tablet devices. Traditionally colocation data centres are known for securely housing, connecting, monitoring and maintaining mission-critical IT equipment and data.
Today, however, industry perceptions along with the data centre offerings are changing. It is becoming more popular to partner with a data centre specialist to manage the content aggregation and distribution, while also benefiting from improved availability, scalability and flexibility of your IT infrastructure.
The rapid emergence of the online digital media market and increased demands on performance and availability have lead Interxion to develop a new, centralised Digital Media Content Hub.
The initiative raises the standard of data centre offerings to a more strategic level, by creating an online community of interest for content aggregators and distributors. It provides an ideal environment for effective aggregation, exchange, storage and management, with excellent proximity to audiences and industry peers through an unrivalled concentration of CDNs, ISPs and Internet Exchanges.
With a community of digital content companies such as content management platforms and content distribution networks residing in-house, Interxion can create an environment where premium content owners can directly access distributors. They can benefit from improved performance, higher levels of resilience and redundancy, greater security, reduced costs through multi-homing, lower latency to end users and increased bandwidth.
A significant advantage of working with Interxion is that it can help reduce the cost of network access and improve business performance by finding the right connectivity partners. Its large and growing community of CDNs, ISPs, Carriers and Internet Exchanges combine to achieve the best possible deals on content delivery rates, private peering arrangements, leased lines, upstream IP-connectivity, and physical cabling to keep costs low and business productivity high.
The Digital Media Content Hubs are located in the key content aggregation and exchange centres at Interxion’s 27 start-of-the-art data centres in
11 countries across Europe. These facilities offer ultra-secure and connected physical space, high-density power, and allow the digital media community to come together to exchange content within the online community. The expected size of the market’s growth is huge as more users consume increasing amounts of digital content on multiple devices. Analyst firm GigaOm Pro, recently announced in its ‘Monetising Digital Content’ report, the international digital content market will increase from $16.7bn (US) in 2009 to $36bn (US) by 20141. Such a strong forecast underlines how important it is to service the sector and develop the right hosting infrastructure.
There is no doubt the rapid demand for premium online content in real time is creating great opportunities for the digital media sector. Coupled with the added focus on minimising capital investment in IT infrastructure and improving business efficiencies through innovative IT systems, companies in the sector will find a further rationale to outsource services to a proven and skilled hosting partner.
Those with the best infrastructure will have the ability to react quickest and establish a strong position in this emerging market. The Digital Media Hubs are at the heart of this and offer the sector that opportunity.
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Tags: Servers, Green Tech, Hosting & Colocation |
