SteamBoat Ventures buys into EdgeCast
Steamboat Ventures, an investment firm of Disney, is set to announce Monday that it has acquired an interest in EdgeCast, an Internet delivery network that competes with industry leader Akamai Technologies. EdgeCast has 50 customers, about half of which are media companies. One of its largest clients is Imax, which used EdgeCast for serving up online video marketing for such movies as “Beowulf,” “Spider-Man 3,” “Transformers” and “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.”
EdgeCast previously raised $4 million from Viacom, CinemaNow and Lionsgate Entertainment.
SteamBoat has invested $6 million in EdgeCast, claiming that its technology is cheaper than that offered by Akamai, a $6.5 billion company, as well as others in the content distribution networks business, including Limelight Networks and Internap.
EdgeCast uses only 13 locations globally to serve up content quickly to end users while more established companies like Akamai have thousands of locations worldwide though stocked with less powerful servers.
From the EdgeCast website:
EdgeCast Networks, Inc. offers a superior, cost-effective, global content delivery service that gives our customers competitive advantage in the delivery of digital media. Our world-class content delivery platform provides customers the cost benefits and flexibility of controlling their own content delivery network while liberating them from bandwidth contracts, capital investments and operational hassles.
EdgeCast was founded in 2006 by a group of successful technology entrepreneurs who have years of experience building network infrastructure, web hosting, and application delivery products and companies.
EdgeCast provides content delivery services for traditional media companies, television and movie studios, advertising networks, web video and content providers, game and software delivery, social media, and more. EdgeCast enables these companies to provide their end users with the highest possible performance and quality of content delivery, regardless of the user location or connection to the Internet, while at the same time providing an array of technologies to reduce the overall cost of content delivery.
Article in Hollywood Reporter
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