Introduction

Businesses within the content and digital media sector especially recognise that time and speed-to-market are key considerations that can result in a competitive advantage.

Put simply, if content is delivered quickly and efficiently to end users it can optimise costs and revenue.

This is because users have limited patience when it comes to delays in pages loading or videos starting and will abandon web pages or videos if they do not receive the experience they expect. An example of this can be seen in a research report published last year by Ramesh Sitaraman, computer science professor, UMass Amherst and S. Shunmuga Krishnan, senior system software engineer at Akamai Technologies. The study, entitled "Video Stream Quality Impacts Viewer Behaviour" found that viewers begin abandoning videos if they don’t load within 2 seconds and every additional second result’s in an additional 6% of viewers abandoning the content. The study showed that after 5 seconds, 20% of viewers had already given up.

Speed to market is not only tied to delivering a service to the end users, the industry as a whole is fast-moving, with consumer demand increasing new products coming to the market it means content and digital media companies need to be able to swiftly innovate to exploit new opportunities.

Taking into account these considerations the appropriate choice of network-neutral, carrier-dense data centre provider and the ability to interconnect with partners, suppliers and customers can help content and digital media organisations improve service performance, as well as reduce costs and innovate quickly. The players willing to adapt to the ever-changing landscape will be best placed to thrive, leaving the laggards behind in both the commercial and competitive sense.

Fast delivery of services and reducing time-to-market

There is an increasingly complex set of relationships between online service deployments and supporting technologies – including cloud services, workflow solutions, payment gateways, advertising solutions, platform management systems, CDNs and other service components – which mean that online service providers have a host of communication and interconnection requirements with third party systems.

This complexity is not something that should be taken lightly. New technologies bring with them new players. In the age of ‘more’ – more devices, more data and more users – content and digital media companies have witnessed a number of new players entering the value chain requiring businesses to deliver services faster in an attempt to stay abreast of the ever increasing customer demands.

And, in this age of more, consumers are demanding new products and services faster. Boredom thresholds are low and the demand for new content and applications is insatiable – the quicker you can innovate, the more money you can make. Rovio’s Angry Birds is a great example over 1bn downloads now for its multiple special editions and platform variants. Whilst this is a gaming specific example, it has set a standard for keeping users refreshed and entertained and for keeping the money rolling in. Content providers need to be working at the same pace, they need to keep abreast of a wealth of new platforms like Snapchat, Vine, Tencent and Soundcloud and a whole host of platforms from the traditional broacdcast TV to the iPhone and soon, possibly to new wearable technologies like Google Glass – they need to innovate in new ways, with new providers to ensure they can continue to monetise their content and they need to do it faster than ever before. By collaborating with partners, this innovation can occur. Using the collective research and development power available across mobile, content and cloud providers, content and applications can be brought to market faster, monetised efficiently and deliver a quality user experience from the get go. Organisations stuck in their own innovation silos will struggle to keep pace with those that are bringing together the best minds in multiple industries to help solve their service delivery and product development challenges. Only the fittest will survive.

The real-time bidding opportunity

Emerging technologies such as real-time bidding (RTB) are helping to accelerate the value of the display advertising sector and is an example of where fast connectivity and reduced latency are key to a business’s competitive advantage. IDC estimates that RTB sales in Western Europe will grow from $227 million in 2011 to $2.5 billion in 2016 (IDC, Real-Time Bidding in the US and World 2011-2016, 2012 report) Real-Time Bidding allows marketers to bid, in real-time, for a web user’s attention. Web users are segmented based on the site they’re visiting, their past browsing history and other factors. Marketers compete to place adverts around content which these users are viewing, based on pre-set criteria which match the user characteristics.

Similarly, in the financial trading market, Real-Time Bidding is a high-frequency trading mechanism and fast, reliable connections are important for bidder positioning. The advantages provided by the technology – largely increasing the monetisation of existing inventory – mean that it is an attractive solution for publishers.

Future proofing in the Data Centre

The choice of a data centre is an often overlooked component for content and digital media businesses. For those services requiring very low latency, that choice is a crucial part of deployment strategy and comes with a range of benefits that can be achieved through careful selection, including speed-to-market, service performance gains and cost savings.

Increasing website load time, coupled with the growth of speed-critical services such as real-time bidding, choice in colocation solution will be increasingly critical for online services looking to optimise the consumer experience.

Platform Equinix™ enables content and digital media companies to interconnect via Equinix Marketplace™ to an ecosystem of new and existing suppliers, partners and customers inside the Data Centre reducing time-to-market, and removing inefficiencies and delays from the digital supply chain. All of this can be enabled on a truly global scale.

Transformational changes are happening in the content and digital media space and the choice of data centre can be game changing in terms of being able to harness innovation, monetisation and collaboration on a global scale. Make the right move and you’ll be well positioned for the future.

For more information on the competitive value of speed, please click here to contact Equinix »