Image by playerx via Flickr

It’s nice to see Amazon moving into the CDN space with their Cloudfront offering, it seems like the CDN market can definitely use some fresh look at the challenge. It looks like it builds off your usage of Amazon S3 but with an accelerator finding the closest cache server to deliver your content. With this approach it doesn’t seem like a great fit as a CDN for any architecture. The chart on the right is an interesting comparison.

I’ve been intrigued over the last couple of years with Coral Caching. Peer to peer open source caching seems like it’s ripe with opportunity, wouldn’t it be cool if my mediacenter pc, apple tv and other laptops that sit at home idle during the day could be leveraged to help offload servers. I guess it’s a balance of saving power and sleeping or turning off the box vs. using less server power.

Image via Wikipedia

Image via CrunchBase

So, during the historic exciting inaugaration yesterday, many of the big folks seemed to ‘melt’ down as I like to put it. Poor quality video, audio not synced, etc. I am sure there were lots of folks rebooting servers to try and keep up, but it just didn’t seem to work. While Akamai and others streamed millions of streams, up to 5.4 million simultaneous viewers per minute, there were still poor experiences. It really feels like we need to do a better job of peer to peer streaming as a more efficient long term solution. Joost was heading down that route, but it sounds like they pulled their peer to peer when they went to the in browser player. I did watch some of the inaugaraion on Joost and it worked great by the way. I also read a mention of a new technology from a company called RayV which looks promising. The premise being, as more people watch the quality increases. Even though the company is called RayV I have no affiliation:)….