Yahoo has been making major moves to vamp up its content strategy, and it is continuing that momentum with the acquisition of PeerCDN, a content delivery network provider that aims to make the Web faster and more reliable, while helping websites reduce bandwidth costs – the company claims it can reduce bandwidth costs by up to 90 percent by creating a peer-to-peer network. PeerCDN uses WebRTC’s data channel protocol, so this is an interesting move to watch as it brings a new big Web player beyond Google to WebRTC.
The WebRTC data channel provides connectivity using a peer-to-peer connection, and can be used beyond voice and video communications, including file sharing and screen sharing. It enables websites to become hubs for managing large amounts of data without actually having to store or provide transmission bandwidth for that information distribution.
“When we started PeerCDN, our vision was to build a next-generation content delivery network — cheaper, faster, and easier than existing solutions,” the company’s founders said in a statement on its website. “As PeerCDN grew, we found that many developers were ecstatic about fast response times and reduced bandwidth costs, but even more were excited by the new experiences that order-of-magnitude cheaper bandwidth would enable.”
PeerCDN’s technology can offer value for Yahoo in a few ways. For starters, its push for content includes new hires David Pogue and Katie Couric, which means there will be a lot of rich media content – bandwidth-intensive content. As Yahoo increases its native audio and video content, PeerCDN’s network can help improve the reliability, quality and cost savings of that media.
Yahoo has also been experiencing mail outages for some users, so if those are related to server capacity, this technology can help.
“Today, we are thrilled to announce that we are joining Yahoo. We’ve found that they share our passion for excellent web experiences, as well as our love for web technologies like WebRTC, HTML5, and JavaScript,” they said. “We’re excited by the possibilities — together we’ll be able to create even more amazing web experiences.”
Google has worked with WebRTC development for its browser, Chrome, but it is also working with real-time communications capabilities for features like Google Hangouts and Google Helpouts. It will be interesting to see if Yahoo wants to raise the bar of WebRTC potential and implement some of its own projects to compete with Google’s real-time services, or if it will stay using WebRTC on the backend. Either way, it’s exciting to add another major Web player’s name to the mix; it’s setting up 2014 to be a growth year for WebRTC.
Edited by
Ryan Sartor
