White Paper
The Shifting Landscape for Content Streamers
Over the past few years there have been a number of well-publicized exits from the CDN market, some due to bankruptcy and others due to thoughtful business decisions. In either case, roughly half a petabit per second of capacity has simply gone away. This should be alarming because for most streaming platforms, i.e., those employing “multi-CDN” strategies, CDNs are strategic suppliers that are vital to their long-term business interests. These two herculean challenges—massive traffic spikes associated with live sports and a financially weakened underlying delivery infrastructure—mean that streaming platforms need to rethink their relationships with CDNs
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Introduction
On January 16, 2007 the world changed in an epochal way. Netflix launched its online streaming service. Although “the future” took longer to arrive than most had anticipated back in those heady days, it’s finally here.
In May, 2025, according to research from Nielsen, streaming over-the-top (OTT) video in the United States eclipsed cable and broadcast TV combined. And while it has taken almost two decades to arrive at this point, it’s not difficult to envision the day when virtually all video is streamed as unicast IP sessions over broadband or cellular connections.
But clouds are on the horizon. The vast majority of streaming video to date has been of the on-demand variety. Arguably, video on demand (VOD), while representing a massive increase in traffic for all aspects of the internet infrastructure, is a relatively straight forward use case.
Basically, Shifting Landscape for Content Streamers large files transferred to playback apps that can buffer a few seconds of content locally to minimize underruns. Even 4k is just (a lot) more bytes. The clouds on the horizon represent a streaming use case that is relatively newer and much more challenging: the streaming of live content, especially sports.