Need a custom video player for your website? You can code your own player skin, or take the easy route. One of the convenient features in the Limelight video platform solution is the ability to clone player templates and customize them with features like watermarks, color changes, and icon adjustments. The picture above shows one completely custom UI (designed by accessing our player API), and several templates that have been tweaked using simple menu commands. Once you create your own, you can publish any video through it using an automatically-generated embed code. Change your player at will, or use different skins for different video channels.

It’s been a while since our annual sales conference in Phoenix last month, but the photos are in, and we wanted to share some of the fun we had during one event in particular. Limelight teamed with the non-profit organization Jose’s Closet for an evening of Olympic-sized games and community outreach. Jose’s Closet was established in 2007 to help foster families in need, and at the event, a total of 26 foster children from the organization joined with 280 Limelight employees in a little friendly competition.

The event was organized around seven fun and engaging activities, including a contest in shooting hoops, a life-size tangram challenge, a bicycle relay race, and more. Prior to each challenge, teams were given an empty diaper bag that needed to be filled with diapers, shampoo, formula and the like. Each child led his/her team in every challenge, and by the end of the night, all 28 teams had a full bag to donate to Jose’s Closet.

More often than not, children are placed in foster homes with only the clothes on their backs. Jose’s Closet offers foster and adoptive parents a place where they can go to obtain necessary supplies, including clothing, diapers, food, and more. We were pleased to join the cause as a community of Limelighters, and to spend time with children from Jose’s Closet, who all served as wonderful ambassadors in forwarding the organization’s mission. The event provided a rich experience in sharing, listening and working with others toward a common goal – for both the children and our employees.

“Thanks for the event! My kids are still so excited. It will be a memory they will share and treasure for a long time. You gave them a great gift allowing them to meet all those great people and experience such esteem building activities. They really feel like part of the team!” – Parent

“What a great event! Watching fellow Limelighters come together for such a great cause made me feel proud to work here. It was great to see the kids participate in each event, including helping come up with “raps”, captaining the adult teams and most of all, just having fun. Well played, Limelight!” – Limelight Networks Employee

How can you support Jose’s Closet?
Jose’s Closet accepts monetary and item donations. For more information on what items they need or how to join their membership program, you can visit their website at http://www.josescloset.org/. You can also “like” and follow Jose’s Closet on Facebook.

We’ve got good news for Limelight Networks customers. The new CONTROL dashboard (an update on the portal formerly known as EXCHANGE) is now available for everyone using Limelight services. Simpler, prettier, and with more features on tap, CONTROL lets you drill down into different service menus for configuration changes, reports, and online help options. It’s designed to let you get your hands on the controls (literally) so you can optimize our services in a way that’s best for your business. Take a look at some of the screenshots here (click to see larger image), or log in to your account for a test drive.

It was a hopeless case. Vietnam veteran Leroy Comer had been fighting for disability rights for two decades by the time his case was taken up by attorneys with the Federal Circuit Bar Association’s Veterans Pro Bono service in 2008. Dion Messer, IP corporate counsel with Limelight Networks, was one of those attorneys. Against all odds, she managed to secure a rebrief for Comer with the Federal Circuit Court, and ultimately won a precedent-setting case gaining new rights for veterans applying for disability compensation.

The details of the landmark Comer case are outlined in an article in The American Legion Magazine from last year – including Comer’s diagnosis of PTSD, his 21-year battle with the VA for support, and the work of Dion Messer and her colleague Edward Reines to win Comer his long-overdue compensation in the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

New, however, is an award to Dion for her service in the case. At a recent event, Chief Judge Radar, from the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and Chief Judge Green, from the Court of Appeals for Veterans’ Claims, honored Dion for both her work with the Federal Circuit Bar Association’s Veterans Pro Bono Committee, and her success in pursuing Comer’s appeal. This association has only ever honored four people, including Dion, with the Veteran’s Pro Bono leadership award. Limelight Networks would also like to acknowledge Dion Messer and offer congratulations on her achievement. We are proud of and impressed by her accomplishment, and feel honored as a company to have Dion as a part of the Limelight Networks team.

LimelightSITE, the newest addition to our content delivery offerings, leverages Limelight Networks’ advanced routing methodology called OriginDirect™. This innovation bypasses “middle-mile” Internet bottlenecks by fulfilling requests over our own dedicated fiber-optic backbone. So your objects speed their way to your users and your web pages load in a flash — no matter how many visitors are on your site or how far your content needs to travel to their browsers.

Your own private Internet
In fact, you can think of our CDN as a private, global Internet available only to Limelight Networks customers. Our backbone joins together massive Delivery Centers, strategically located to connect directly into more than 900 last-mile access networks. OriginDirect integrates with this robust CDN architecture to retrieve and deliver both static and dynamic web content at lightning-speed.

Rather than trying to maneuver across the often-congested, unpredictable public Internet, OriginDirect routes requests from the edge directly to your origin server. And with same awesome performance, it returns the objects that make up your website over the same private, high-capacity path — directly to your end users.

IP Connect for added performance
If your website is co-located within the same facility as one of our regional Delivery Centers, you can realize even greater performance gains. We can use IP Connect to create a private connection between your site and our CDN — so your content refreshes will always bypass the Internet. IP Connect is available as a Gigabit or 10-Gigabit Ethernet link.

Not just for website acceleration
LimelightSITE isn’t the only CDN service that benefits from OriginDirect. This innovative methodology accelerates all traffic on our network, including software downloads, video and audio, and other content delivered using LimelightDELIVER, LimelightSTREAM, or IP Connect services.

Where in the world is your audience?

Segment your markets. Tailor your content. With the Geo Reporting feature in LimelightEXCHANGE Premium, you’ll have the information you need to make better business decisions. This robust feature enables you to assess traffic at the global or continent level—and drill down instantly for city-by-city details. With quick and easy views of traffic data in different geographies, you’ll be in a position to deliver the right Flash Video, mp3 streams — or any other content — to audiences around the world.

At-a-glance information. Any way you want it.

Geo Reporting provides geographic information for each Limelight Networks service and each sub-report — in a choice of map and table formats. Color-coded maps show you the hot spots of activity around the world. Choose to display all geographies at once or only the top 10 locations. As with other LimelightEXCHANGE features, you can compare locations based on number of requests, bytes sent, and total seconds — or as a percent of total volume. But Geo Reporting puts more detail by country, state, or city just a click away.

Choose LimelightEXCHANGE Premium to gain all the advantages of Geo Reporting.

Secure banking, online gaming, social media — you can’t cache your dynamic content, but you can still send these packets flying at the speed of light. With IP Connect, a LimelightDELIVER option or standalone service, you can serve regular Internet traffic on the same highly scalable architecture that sits at the core of our CDN services.

Whether seeding your cache with Cache Fill, accelerating HTML delivery, or simply enhancing your overall deliver platform, your services gains the performance benefits of our private fiber-optic network when you host your servers in one of the same strategically located data centers. We’ll connect them to your users via full-route broadcasting to tier-one commercial providers and more than 900 access networks.

Direct access to user networks

IP Connect boasts direct interconnections with more than 900 access networks — most of the world’s largest networks. The result? More than 85% of content delivered via IP Connect returns directly to the access network from which it was requested, never through an intermediary network.

To further performance, reliability, and scalability, IP Connect maintains the fastest available connections — usually 10-Gigabit Ethernet — into these access networks. Simply put, IP Connect transmits your web pages more quickly, makes online games more responsive, decreases auction delays, and boosts chat time.

Cache Fill option

You may need IP Connect for Cache Fill connectivity rather than Full Route service. This means you connect to us at one of our Delivery Centers to populate your content across the Limelight Networks CDN. Whether you choose Limelight CDN storage or prefer to store source content on your own servers, the IP Connect Cache Fill service ingests your data across a 1- or 10-Gigabit Ethernet port for distribution to our Delivery Center servers.

Not just for CDN customers

You don’t have to be a LimelightDELIVER customer to gain access to IP Connect functionality. Send and receive email, run an online store, deploy live help — you name it(1) — it will get to your users more quickly when you choose IP Connect on the Limelight Networks infrastructure. And when your business grows to require full CDN services, you’ll already be connected to a world-class content delivery platform.

Single source advantage

Choose IP Connect to reduce IT complexity and increase redundancy. When you turn to one network provider for end user service of both regular and cached content, your data is always on our network, so there’s never a network miss. In addition, you can leverage your single relationship with Limelight Networks to reduce your IT costs. And should there be a network issue, our expert support staff stands by, ready to respond rapidly — so troubleshooting is one convenient phone call away.

How it works

You’ll need to run and maintain your own servers at one of the data centers below.(2) Then Limelight Networks or a third party connects your hardware with ours via 1- or 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports.(3) IP Connect lets you use the Border Gateway Protocol with your AS number or ours. Limelight Networks can also provide IP addresses on an as-needed basis. We advise using multi-homing for fault tolerance and can make further recommendations in complex situations with IP Connect Jump Start Services. IP Connect services are available 100% of the time, and Limelight Networks will give you seven days notice of any maintenance that will impact service.

Availability

Take advantage of IP Connect services at data centers in or near the following cities:
USA: Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Phoenix area, San Francisco Bay area, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.
Canada: Toronto, Vancouver
Europe: Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, Madrid, Milan, Paris, and Stockholm

Contact a Limelight Networks representative for location details.

Notes

1. Except for spam. Seriously.
2. Speak with a Limelight Networks representative if you need managed servers.
3. If you need a local loop to connect to a Limelight Networks data center from a separate building, you must engage a third-party vendor.

With the LimelightEXCHANGE Reporting API, you can access and display content delivery data in entirely new ways. Available with both LimelightEXCHANGE and LimelightEXCHANGE Premium, the Reporting API lets you view reports anywhere – in desktop gadgets, custom dashboards, and analytics packages. Or import it into your data warehouse for integrated reporting with other business information.

Liberate your data

With direct access to the source data, you can create new reports that meet your specific needs. Overlay trend lines to compare and contrast different time periods. Show cumulative progress toward goals. Even send alerts when you detect certain conditions.

Have it your way

The LimelightEXCHANGE Reporting API can be accessed from any programming language that supports SOAP protocols, including client-side JavaScript and all major server-side languages. Sample C# and PHP code makes it easy to get started. See our Traffic Report Google Gadget as a finished example.