Streaming Media Expert: Industry Analyst, Writer and Consultant. Chairman of the NAB Show Streaming Summit (dan@danrayburn.com)
The market for third-party CDN services, which I define as the delivery of video and small/large objects, was about $5 billion in 2023. (Full blog post: https://lnkd.in/ekFZqX9y) This figure does not include revenue for services tied to security (WAF, DDoS, etc.), compute, hardware, and storage and excludes delivery in China. The number excludes any company with its own DIY CDN, like Netflix and YouTube, that doesn’t sell its infrastructure as a service to other companies. The figure also excludes revenue from vendors offering online video platforms, including Brightcove, Uplynk, AWS Media Services, Quickplay, Deltatre, Mediakind, Sports Radar, Cognizant, Endeavor Streaming, StreamAMG, Bedrock Streaming, etc., which combined saw revenue of about $1.8 billion in 2023. Based on what I know, AWS Media Services is the largest of the group, with about $450 million in revenue in 2023. While reports produced by research firms say the CDN market was multiple times larger than my number, they are wrong. Full stop. Do not buy their reports. Akamai, Fastly, Edgio, CDN77, and others disclose enough details tied to their delivery revenue that we have numbers to form a good foundation for market sizing. The market is not as big as many suggest, and those writing about the size of the CDN space don’t define it and include non-CDN services like transcoding, hardware, hosting, storage and transit in their numbers. Full blog post: https://lnkd.in/ekFZqX9y Listen to my special CDN-focused podcast from July 2024 for more details and updates regarding 4K, low/ultra-low latency, CMCD, DIY (TikTok, Disney), Open Caching, pricing and multi-CDN. https://lnkd.in/epzXSMVA Vendors mentioned: Akamai Technologies, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Edgio, Fastly, Cloudflare, CDN77, Medianova CDN, MainStreaming, Qwilt, Wowza, Ateme, Broadpeak, Gcore, Netskrt Systems Inc., Varnish Software, Vecima Networks Inc., Velocix.
Jason Livingood
1mo
If the CDN market will grow 3%, it may mean the market has STOPPED GROWING (~3% is rate of inflation). That seems like a big story, and maybe an indicator that the internet is at a pivot from stored file delivery (CDNs, video streaming) to more real-time traffic and compute.
Erik Herz
1mo
Thank you, Dan Rayburn Where does SYE delivery fit in with this? Previously a handful of CDN vendors provided SYE hosting to Prime Video on dedicated servers. I wonder how many CDN vendors still provide SYE delivery now (at least one no longer supports it: Lumen) and if this is part of their delivery revenue mix. SYE comes with a substantial cost premium. If it is in the mix, I wonder what percent is SYE-based for each. This might be interesting to track as Prime Video gains more SYE-based viewership.
Joshua R.
1mo
By gartner's report from 10 years ago, shouldn't it be $20+Bln.
Damien Lucas
1mo
Very interesting market study Dan ! Thanks for sharing the numbers. I would be interested in your view of the potential convergence between Cloud Providers business and CDN providers ? AWS and Google are in your analysis, Akamai has acquired Linode, what would you expect from the other cloud providers ?
Thomas Box
1mo
This is great info, Dan. Extrapolating delivery out of the other services is difficult, as bundling CDN into services seems to be every CDN's strategy. The growth of Open Caching vs. B2B CDN is something I'm watching.
Very informative. I think open caching is still being resisted by big players and if adapted widely may bring overall recurring revenue down . Dan Rayburn , if you could share any insight on that
Thanks for sharing the real numbers, Dan. From my experience at Streamroot and managing the CDN at Lumen Content Delivery, I can confirm that my observations align with yours. The CDN delivery market has been stagnating for a few years now, and I don’t foresee significant growth in the near future. This stagnation is indeed driven by several factors: customer consolidation, price pressure from streaming platforms striving for profitability, and a lack of substantial increases in bitrate. That being said, there are less and less CDN vendors capable to bid for these customers spending >$100M in delivery, it might affect the price compression at one point.
MainStreaming
1mo
Thank you for observing and noting MainStreaming. We are set out to tackle the streaming challenges with the goal of ensuring that everyone enjoys live events buffer-free without the "neighbor effect." For us, the viewers' smooth experience matters the most; it's the core principle that drives our Intellient Media Delivery Company. As always, you are doing a neat and transparent job out there, Dan Rayburn! Bravo! 👏
With such exponential growth in streaming media it's surprising that this market is only making 5b$ of that pie. Maybe there isn't much differentiation for a pressing adoption to these CDNs and the cloud players are offering this as a service cheap.
Founder
1moNot sure of your logic and how you think AWS Media Services is a media platform, aws clearly distinguishes between cloud front and media services that are two completely separate offerings. Media services and CloudFront are components of an OVP but media services is not an OVP The public data on cloud front for example would include stream amg as they are a customer of aws and would be reported in that revenue. There is lots being mixed up here.