New Radiohead Album Being Delivered By Level 3’s CDN

About two weeks ago, the band Radiohead told customers they could "name their own price" for their soon to be released new album. Starting yesterday, the album was available for download from the Radiohead website and when you download the 50MB file, it redirects you to the Level 3 network for the content.

While not an indication that Level 3 is going to put any of the other CDNs out of business, it is proof that Level 3 is continuing to sign up large customers even though they have yet to announce them. First it was Metacafe’s videos that an analyst noticed were coming from Level 3, then I noticed the live streams for DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket package were coming from Level 3 and now this new Radiohead album. Clearly Level 3 is already starting to get some traction in the market for large scale delivery of video and static content via streaming and downloading. And with many in the industry assuming or speculating that Level 3 is going to offer a cheaper price for their streaming CDN offering next month, and the announcement last week by Level 3 that they are pricing their transit product and static CDN service at the same price, the company is clearly lining up to make a full on assault on the market in this quarter.

The CDN industry, which was once a very quiet segment of this industry even two years back, is now the hottest and fastest growing segment of this market in terms of the number of solutions and providers in the space and entering the fray. The next 24 months are going to be a fun ride.