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The FCC put out the results of a monumental study today detailing how US Internet service providers perform based on the speeds they advertise. While there is a large amount of information to parse, one data set deserves highlighting because it is likely to get overlooked in much of the media coverage. Among other figures, the FCC calculated page load times as related to advertised ISP speeds. The finding? While there’s a big jump in download times between advertised speeds of under 1 Mbps and speeds of 2 Mbps or more, the difference between speed tiers tapers off significantly once you hit rates of roughly 6 Mbps, and even more so at rates of 10 Mbps and higher.

So what does this mean? It means for web browsing, Internet speed isn’t everything. Once you hit a minimum speed tier, other factors create a much bigger impact on performance – factors like latency and page optimization. As consumer broadband speeds continue to increase, publishers will have to focus more heavily on these factors in order to create the most effective websites. Overall speeds will always be important, but the better measurement of success for consumers going forward will be how long it takes to view and interact with a site. That, far more than broadband speed tier, will determine the quality of the browsing experience.

Limelight Networks announced today that the Middle East Broadcasting Company is using our integrated solutions for online video publishing, site acceleration and online media delivery. MBC is the largest broadcasting group in the Middle East, and its two websites, Shahid.net and AlArabiya.net, provide on-demand content and live streaming video from the network’s satellite TV station to online viewers around the world.

While it’s always good to announce a new customer, we’re also showcasing MBC because of the returns the media conglomerate is seeing from the integrated use of our video services. Specifically, by deploying the Limelight Video Platform combined with our media delivery technology, MBC is benefiting from faster video ingest and large file transfers. More importantly, MBC is able to deliver a better viewing experience to its online customers through our ability to make near-real-time adjustments during the video delivery process. Even as network conditions change from moment to moment, we are helping MBC navigate the web so users get the best possible video playback from the company’s live and on-demand streams.

From the press release, here is MBC’s list of requirements that Limelight Networks had to meet for video publishing and content delivery:

• Guaranteed high quality video
• Video Storage and content delivery facilities for various websites
• Scalability for future requirements, including specific demands such as SmartPhones, STB or Connected TV sets support
• Pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll advertising
• Syndication to YouTube
• Video Analytics
• Ease of video publishing workflow
• Extensive APIs for content management

It’s been a month since we acquired Clickability, and while there’s a lot going on behind the scenes, we haven’t be able to report on much from the still-early integration efforts. With that in mind, here’s a look at one of the technologies Clickability brings to the Limelight portfolio. Consider it a product spotlight, and a hint of more things to come from Limelight Networks.

The Clickability Web Content Management (WCM) product provides a platform for web publishing that addresses a wide range of content types and distribution models. Whether you’re publishing a full-fledged corporate website, creating a microsite for your latest marketing campaign, or centralizing control of several websites in one management interface, the Clickability WCM solution offers flexible tools to simplify the process and drive high-performance results. Here are a few of the characteristics worth noting.

• Dynamic publishing and content support: Content doesn’t stand still on the web. The Clickability solution lets your propagate changes instantly throughout your site or sites, or schedule changes as needed. You can also set up business logic rules to tailor content on the fly for different site visitors.
• Template tools: Because Clickability is template-based, it’s easy to feed content to different site modules in an automated fashion. Add a blog, a subscribers-only section, or an area for users to submit their own content, and the publishing workflow is simplified through whatever templates you choose to implement.
• Content sharing and mobile options: If you want to syndicate or share content, Clickability uses an XML-based content repository that lets you customize that content for its intended audience. This works not only for sharing material across different sites, but also for optimizing sites automatically on mobile devices.
• Lots of extras: Your business has its own unique requirements for the web, and we support them with integrated ad serving, search engine optimization, multilingual capabilities, social media tools, reporting and analytics features, and much more.

Another day, another acquisition. Today we announced that Limelight Networks has acquired AcceloWeb, a company that brings with it technology for accelerating the presentation layer of websites and applications. Check out the demo for a side-by-side comparison of a site loading with AcceloWeb and one without. You’ll get a sense of just how much of an impact the technology can have, and why it’s a strong addition to our suite of site acceleration services.

From the press release:

“…AcceloWeb’s technology addresses the bottleneck of presenting a site or application within a browser. The technology requires zero configuration and no pre-optimization, and does not require any changes to existing web development workflow, reconfiguration of site or application resources, installation of a hardware appliance or any server side, browser or desktop plug-ins…”

Several publications covered our acquisition announcement from yesterday, including GigaOM and Telecom Ramblings as excerpted below. Analyst Jim Davis at Tier1 Research also had interesting insights on the deal, but you must be a subscriber or active trialist to access his report. In the meantime, see what Ryan Lawler and Rob Powell had to say.

GigaOM: Limelight Adds CMS to the Cloud With Clickability Buy

“…The acquisition is similar to a few other purchases that Limelight has made, according to CEO Jeff Lunsford, who we spoke with via phone. In looking at potential acquisitions, Limelight looks for quality teams that have built a good product but haven’t had great luck with sales and marketing. It then fits the technology and team in with its own architecture, and hopes to accelerate revenues by selling across its customer base.

What you get when you buy a company like this is 60 happy customers and a team with deep domain expertise that is usually happy to be a part of something bigger than they were,” Lunsford said. The strategy has worked so far, particularly with the acquisition of video distribution platform Delve Networks. While Delve was also purchased on the cheap, under Limelight the platform has doubled its revenues…”

Telecom Ramblings: Limelight Acquires Clickability

“Limelight Networks (NASDAQ:LLNW, news, filings) took another step into the cloud yesterday with the acquisition of Clickability. Clickability is a software-as-a-service provider of web content management tools, meaning they enable their customers to create and manage their website content via their specialized software and distributed server infrastructure. Limelight will take that offering and integrate it alongside its traditional CDN business, video platform, and the EyeWonder advertising services, where in fact it does seem to fit quite nicely.

With this acquisition, Limelight continues to expand its value-added services portfolio, and thus increases the overall revenue opportunity for its products while decreasing its dependence on the products that make up the more traditional CDN sector…”

Limelight Networks today announced the acquisition of Clickability, a Software-as-a-Service provider of content management tools on the web. The news follows several other SaaS acquisitions in the last year, including most prominently EyeWonder and Delve Networks. In a press release statement, CEO Jeff Lunsford notes that revenue from the Delve acquisition has doubled since we acquired the company in 2010.

A couple of notes on Clickability – First, the company offers three primary solutions:

• Clickability Web Content Management for website publishing with embedded tools for workflow management, marketing support, multi-lingual and multi-site management, social media and more.
• Clickability Website Marketing Acceleration for automated audience targeting and content personalization.
• Clickability Website Express for custom website design.

Second, the company has been a rising star in its own right, winning coveted awards from the Software and Information Industry Association and CRM Magazine. Clickability also brings with it a strong stable of clients including notable names such as the Tribeca Film Festival, Cantor Fitzgerald, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and PR Newswire.

Stay tuned for more as we welcome Clickability to the Limelight Networks family.

In a recent webinar with MarketingProfs, we ran out of time before addressing all of the questions from the audience. Here’s a condensed version of what was left over (some questions have been combined), along with answers from our own Sandy Shanman.

Sometimes rich media can slow down or crash computers of customers with older machines. Are there any ways to balance that out and not lose/annoy those customers?

Yes! This is one of the primary arguments for web acceleration services. A content delivery partner can help you optimize the site experience for your users by improving performance in the network, and therefore taking a lot of the burden off the end-user’s device. Even if an old PC doesn’t render media as quickly as a new one would, the performance gains from network delivery optimization help to make up the difference and create the richest experience for consumers. In addition, techniques like adaptive bit-rate streaming respond to users’ connection settings to deliver media at a quality level that their individual devices can handle. An older computer on a low-bandwidth Internet connection might not be able to handle HD video, but with adaptive streaming it can still access the same video at a lower bit-rate.

Beyond web acceleration, there are numerous ways to improve site performance to make sure a media-heavy site doesn’t leave some customers behind. Examples include improving the underlying code (combining scripts and stylesheets, optimizing site search, etc.), and making sure to compress every file on your site – even the smallest objects. This is something you can do on your own, or we offer site optimization services including site Health Checks.

How should publishers deal with premium content and issues of content theft? What is the best way to deliver video content securely to purchasers and end-users?

The best way to secure content is to use encryption and authentication. Among our content security services, we offer Media Vault, which embeds an authentication code into your URL. Only authorized users can then access the content on that page. Other features with the service include the ability to authorize only specific IP addresses or blocks of addresses, and the ability to set a time window when access is allowed.

Can HTML5 emails by read by mobile phones?

It depends on the mobile phone. For those that don’t support HTML emails, you should offer text-only versions. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t still make use of rich media. Our Limelight REACH service creates a Universal URL for any media content you want to use, and that link can be embedded in text emails, SMS messages, and anywhere else. The Universal URL automatically detects what type of device an end-user has and provides media playback tailored to that device. If the phone has a web connection, it will be able to access your rich-media content.

With the growth of Android/iPhone market, where does that leave the traditional BlackBerry user?

BlackBerry devices still make up a large percentage of consumer smartphones, which means publishers can’t afford to bypass the platform. ComScore’s latest report still puts BlackBerry market share in the US at close to 29%. That’s an audience too big to ignore.

Nothing sells sporting gear like the rock-star athletes who make the equipment look oh so good. And that premise is at the heart of how Quiksilver, a major European outdoor sports lifestyle company, sells its products online. If you didn’t know better, you might think Quiksilver was actually in the business of creating content. The company website includes video news, rough-cut documentaries, photos, contests, a daily blog, and even Quiksilver music mixes. It’s a crazy, media-heavy site, and it’s designed around the surfers, skaters, and snowboarders who make the Quiksilver gear popular and inspire so many to get in on the lifestyle.

So what’s a successful retailer with an eye toward marketing and selling products online need to support its business model? The best infrastructure and content delivery services on offer. As announced today, Quiksilver is a customer of ours who is now using Limelight Networks for site acceleration services across multiple areas of its website. That includes product-specific pages with advanced viewing features like image zoom-in and zoom-out, and pages that highlight Quiksilver gear in action with on-demand videos. All told, Limelight now delivers between 80% and 95% of Quiksilver’s site content. They’ve got content. We help it come to life.

Here’s the money quote from today’s press release:

“After working closely with us to explore our technical demands and identify our business requirements, Limelight devised a solution to meet our needs for the acceleration of small objects and video on demand,” stated [Thierry] Bugeat [Head Developer, Quiksilver Europe]. “We are now able to face large audience without any apprehension and provide exceptional service in any location. What’s more, Limelight allowed us to simplify and optimize our infrastructure and enhance our customer experience without increasing costs.”

At a debate yesterday hosted by the New America Foundation, Blair Levin, who led the development of the national broadband plan last year, made a comment on Internet speeds, and the goal to deliver 100-Mbps service to every home in the country by 2020. Levin stated that he believes the public discussion around the plan over-emphasizes connection speeds, and that it should instead focus on the applications being enabled.

Although it’s hard to argue that we shouldn’t aim for speeds of 100 Mbps and higher, Levin brings up an interesting point in turning the conversation to user experiences. He’s referring to broadband use cases, but you could equally use the argument to examine what factors other than speed contribute to performance. Issues like latency and application efficiency also play a role in the quality of a user’s experience. Note the post on the Netflix Tech Blog today that references a single device being responsible for a significant portion of Netflix API requests. Since streaming reports from the device aren’t comparable, that suggests application and/or API inefficiency, and it impacts how users experience Netflix streaming.

To go even further, if you look at websites more generically, there are plenty of on-site factors that create a better experience and are entirely independent of connection speed – factors like page layout, content storage rules, and streamlined search. Speed is clearly important, but it’s not the only attribute to optimize for. There’s a lot more to the performance package.

Over the last several months we have produced three reports in a series we’ve called Beyond Buffering: Making Rich Media Deliver. These reports cover different ways to use rich media in marketing efforts: what different strategies mean, why they work, and how to use them to drive your own campaign success. In case you missed the reports the first time around, all three are now bundled in one document with additional bonus material including companion worksheets. The first section looks at cross-platform marketing, and how to deliver rich media to mobile audiences. The second section drills down on the subject of online advertising. And the third section looks at company website strategies, and how to balance creativity and efficiency in your online presence.

This series of reports, now available in one document, is chock-full of research, statistics, and case studies. It’s also free. We hope you’ll take a look, check it out, and enjoy the read.