Digital Fountain’s dip into the content-delivery network pool – DF Splash – offered among the more impressive stage demonstrations this week at DEMOfall07, so much so that a company executive says a couple of conference attendees accused them of pulling a fast one.
Not so, Digital Fountain GM of business development Scott Monson assured me; the video being streamed flawlessly over DF Splash was genuinely originating 2,500 miles away on the East Coast, not a local drive as the skeptics suggested.
Turns out that Amazon Web Services deserves a slice of the credit. From the Digital Fountain press release:
Digital Fountain, Inc., a leading provider of advanced standardized solutions for digital media delivery, today announced it has selected Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) from Amazon Web Services as the infrastructure for its new TV-Quality CDN solution, which will be previewed today at DEMOfall 07 in San Diego. The company also unveiled the name of its new CDN offering – Digital Fountain DF Splash – which will launch early next year.
“By combining our proven, patented and standardized delivery technologies with Amazon EC2 we are able to offer an instant-on TV-quality user experience without the requirement of a costly edge infrastructure,” said Charlie Oppenheimer, CEO of Digital Fountain. “In effect, our technology enables us to uniquely apply supply chain management strategies to achieve competitive advantage in the content delivery business.”
While Digital Fountain is promising to upset the apple carts of the Akamais of the world, the company said it isn’t ready to release pricing information for DF Splash, which is expected to launch in January.
“We will be extremely price competitive,” said Monson. “It will make people stand up and watch.”
My colleague Jason Meserve, who’s been following Digital Fountain for some time now, has more details and conjecture here.
(Speaking of Amazon, you can chat with the company’s top IT exec yourself here at Network World on Monday, Oct. 1. CTO Werner Vogels will be conducting a live text chat from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. ET. No registration necessary, just log in here and start asking questions.)
