A rapdily changing CDN market awaits us!

First it has been a LONG time since I had time to write an update, for those of you that have been checking in thanks for coming back, and I promise to keep this site updated more moving forward.

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So let's discuss the interesting dynamic that is emerging as the economy falls and the plethora of CDN companies compete for a shrinking amount of opportunities and business. I see a few key fundamental trends that will allow large companies with significant traffic to reap healthy contracts to minimize content distribution cost:

1) Akamai will become more price competitive and will attempt to keep a strong hold in accounts where they already have a presence. After their dismal earnings report, I believe they are moving to a loss lead strategy to put pressure on the CDN market as a whole and will use the recession to drive some of their competition to acquisition (or out of business entirely).

2) Smaller CDNs will start to disappear at a rapid rate. Many will be forced to give away their services in light of competition from Akamai, LLNW, L3, etc; with many startups taking staff reductions their ability to perform under load will be challenged.

3) Rollout of new "dynamic streaming" technologies will be pressured by the CAPEX outlay to enable these new networks. Adobe, Microsoft, and others that are pushing new technology through in this economy will find themselves footing the bill for large scale CDN deployments.

4) An ad downturn will impact the ability to deliver HD content conceptually, but CDN price deflation will end up reducing this barrier. I think this will be the most interesting paradigms to emerge, will most major networks (and sites like Hulu) push MORE HD as their CDN economics become more advantageous?

5) P2P becomes irrelevant. Back to point #1, as far as professional level content distribution goes CDNs will be forced to become price competitive to these technologies.

It's going to be very interesting, and I'll revisit this topic as details emerge from within the industry.