red swoosh

Ifilm has a one of the Internet's richest libraries of video including content from all of the major studios, all of the record labels, promotional and long form video with over 6m users viewing per month. Ifilm has built their all-you-can-eat consumer video service on top of a powerful advertising and media business model. In Ifilm�s business content is certainly king, but providing a truly compelling, fresh, and cutting edge experience is imperative to keep users coming back for more.

Ifilm had a bold vision:

Substantially increase the quality of video delivered to Ifilm consumers

Provide a flawless consumer experience that satiating even the most finicky of consumers

Build their product on an advertising platform that would multiply by several times the revenue generated per stream

Doing things the traditional way would lead to failure for this new initiative. The quality of streams and downloads that they could offer their consumers would be severely constrained doing things the old way. Limitations in the average speed of broadband connections and typical network congestion on video feeds reduce the stream experience to well below television quality. Along with the enormous costs of delivering television quality video, Ifilm�s business model was constrained. Before Red Swoosh, they offered a service that served lower quality streams, and would go to advertisers and sell lower-bandwidth video advertising products. They wanted to increase the viewing time their users spent on their site, enhance the advertising products that they could sell to marketers, but without incurring the crippling costs traditionally encountered when delivering TV and DVD quality streams.

Red Swoosh met their needs. Together with Red Swoosh, Ifilm launched their Instant Ifilm web application. Ifilm�s ambition was to leverage their world class content library and provide a best-of-breed broadband entertainment experience, while selling the most compelling advertising products available online—and with gross and net margins a head above ANYONE else in the business.

The user gets several television quality video clips sent to his computer, and when he next visits Ifilm's home page, these clips stream to the home page from the hard drive. The user gets a phenomenal unparalleled online entertainment experience with full screen video, while Ifilm sells higher margin video advertisements to the world's top marketers and brands.

Ifilm can do this when others can't because of the unlimited cost savings that the Red Swoosh technology delivers them. Ifilm doesn�t have to pay for streaming servers, or build out their data center, and can completely avoid huge bandwidth costs and provisioning. With Red Swoosh's Content Grid technology, Ifilm can deliver as much rich content and video as they like for a flat fee. When their users want more video, Ifilm isn't penalized by having to support increasing infrastructure requirements, and when they sell higher margin ads, the resulting increase in revenue goes straight to the bottom line.

Ifilm�s use of Red Swoosh technology is a compelling and innovative approach to the everyday business needs of an online media company. We look forward to providing the tools for more powerful, profitable media experiences on Ifilm.com.

IGN is the largest gaming destination on the Net today. With over 30 million users, and 700 million page views every month, the gaming world looks to IGN as the primary online channel to reach the gaming consumer base. They monetize their service through advertising from marketers and subscription models direct to consumers.

These users require the latest news, strategy tips, rich multimedia and increasingly are demanding digital distribution of their games. IGN knew there was a lot at stake in moving their business to a digital distribution model—there is a huge potential to increase subscription figures, and enhance the media opportunities for gaming's biggest brands. But performance issues and costs with such an ambitious plan could bring the site and the business to its knees.

A couple of things IGN had to consider in launching a download service:

The typical game software package is massive, often weighing in at several hundred Megabytes, costs to distribute this data through traditional means is prohibitive.
Users will be spending hours downloading the latest and greatest game demos. A slow, over-burdened delivery infrastructure will result in unacceptable adoption for the new service, and ultimately a failed product deployment.

IGN's requirements were daunting:

Provide a plug-and-play (CDN-like) delivery infrastructure that could scale well beyond its 30 million users
Provide “broadcast economics” that take the marginal costs out of the delivery of content and reduce expenditures by an order of magnitude.
Bring significant performance gains so that IGN can minimize wait time for consumers to retrieve games.

IGN chose Red Swoosh as it is the only provider able to meet IGN's strict requirements with the experience and background to prove it. IGN has integrated the Red Swoosh Content Grid technology and has some interesting results:

Over 1 million IGN consumers using Red Swoosh enhanced delivery
Consumers have seen 2-3x improvements in download speed, they are now able to download files in about one third the time.
IGN has saved close to $40K/month

Ifilm
We asked Red Swoosh to do things that have never been done on the Internet before. They have delivered.

IGN
Red Swoosh provided us with a robust Content Grid product that scales to handle our 10 million users, and our ambitious delivery goals.

Cable & Wireless
These guys are the best in the business. Anybody looking into the Content Grid , P2P networking space is a fool not to take a look at Red Swoosh.