Video Caching Market Finally Growing

    
It seems that 2010 will be the year of video caching - it will finally get the traction is deserves.

While caching itself is as old as the internet, video caching (either fro streaming or file-sharing traffic) is relatively new, and vendors in this space had some difficulties marketing the solution. Main reason is operators’ concerns of legal issues rising from caching copyrighted content. Therefore the vendors focused their sales efforts in markets (mainly parts of Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa) where international bandwidth is expensive, and the ROI for the solution is very quick.

2010 seems to be different:

• Video streaming grew and is now more significant traffic, probably releasing some concerns of caching P2P traffic. The potential monetization benefits (QoS based tiered services, partnering with content providers etc) may be lucrative also to larger operators searching new ways to increase ARPU. See "BT Selects Cisco's Video Content Delivery System" - here.
    
• Introduction of solutions by tier1 vendors: Huawei (here), Cisco (here) and Juniper (here)
     
• Integrated DPI/caching solutions - since an efficient caching solution needs DPI support, an integrated solution is a clear winner. PeerApp offers such solution with Allot and Sandvine
   
• New solutions by smaller vendors - Bluecoat (here), BTI (here)
   
• Integration with gateways - Acision (here)
   
• Integration of CDN and caching - see Alcatel-Lucent (here)

And the results of all this?  

A joint press release from Sandvine and PeerApp shows us some market traction - stating that "within the past six months the Sandvine-PeerApp pre-integrated content caching solution has doubled its deployments and is now being used in 11 service provider networks serving over two million cable and DSL subscribers worldwide".

See "Content Caching Deployments Double Over Past Six Months" - here.

“A transparent caching solution generally saves 20 to 30 percent of transit link and circuit costs for a typical operator,” said Frank Childs, PeerApp’s vice president of marketing. “By pre-integrating and pre-packaging this solution with Sandvine, our customers can quickly and easily attach it to the network, begin saving money immediately and improve their service quality to their subscribers. ”