Dan Rayburn says things will get worse before they get better for CDNs.
With Limelight reporting earnings last night, it’s now clear that the major players in the CDN space, the vendors that control the vast majority of the market share for video delivery, are all experiencing no growth. Akamai’s M&E business was down and Limelight, Internap and Level 3 all reported no revenue growth for their CDN business. And with Q3 typically being a weak quarter for the CDNs and some of them setting guidance that shows no growth over Q2, we may have yet to see the bottom.
While Limelight was very optimistic that they will see growth in the second half of this year and that the CDN market as a whole will pick up, I’m not so sure that industry wide, that’s going to happen in the next two quarters. While pricing still took a decline last quarter, I see the bigger impact being that traffic growth with current customer is no where near the levels it once was and many smaller content owners continue to go under. While Akamai and Limelight both talked about the future of HD and higher-quality video, more devices on the market, blu-ray streaming etc. none of that will take place any time soon on any kind of large scale to impact their revenue in the near-term.