Level 3 this week is releasing a content delivery service designed to help companies with large content libraries prioritize their content based on popularity.

The service, known as the CDXL, keeps track of the number of hits a particular piece of content receives and delivers it from the appropriate architectures based on its popularity. For instance, a video that gets only six hits per week will be delivered directly from storage locations. But if the video becomes more popular, it will be moved out more toward the network edge, where it can be more easily accessed by a greater amount of users.

Ric Poland, Level 3's director of product management, says CDXL is targeted at large companies such as YouTube, MySpace and Brightcove that have large amounts of content to be delivered and no way of prioritizing where it gets delivered from. Because the nature of online content is so viral, Poland says, it can be difficult for companies to anticipate when a particular video or application will require preferential treatment. Because CDXL automatically gives special priority to more popular content, Poland says it will help companies eliminate sudden and unpredictable spikes in demand for content that could otherwise result in slower delivery.

Level 3 has been in the CDN market ever since it acquired Savvis' CDN business last year. Since then, the company has specialized in caching and downloading services that employ standards-based content-delivery models. Among the models that the company's CDN services support are object delivery, which is typically used to deliver patches, file downloads and multimedia content to large groups of users; total site delivery, which can be configured to deliver technology such as Flash and ActiveX for individual domain names; and secure delivery, which specializes in delivering Secure-HTTP content.

Last fall, the company tried to boost demand for its CDN services by cutting its rates down to the those that the company charges for its high-speed Internet service. Though CDNs are typically sold as premium services that can cost up to 30% more than standard high-speed Internet services, Level 3 says it has enough backbone infrastructure to offer the service at the same rate that it offers for its standard high-speed Internet. Much like with its new CDN service, Level 3's price drop was aimed at attracting the business of companies with large-file, large-volume needs.