“With multiple tiers of caching, we minimize calls to origin — even for infrequently accessed content,” Google VP Shailesh Shukla wrote in a blog post yesterday. “This alleviates performance or capacity stress in the content origin and saves costs.”
Media CDN also features tools for ad insertion, allowing customers to dynamically inject video content with ads. Moreover, the service is “built with AI/ML” to power interactive experiences, Google says, like real-time stats during sporting events and purchase links embedded in virtual billboards.
“Media CDN offers comprehensive APIs and automation tools … Detailed, pre-aggregated metrics and playback tracing make it easy to diagnose performance across the entire infrastructure stack,” Shukla continued. “Real-time visibility is provided via Google Cloud’s operations suite.”
But Eric Schmitt, a senior research director at Gartner, says that Media CDN sets the stage to substantially expand Google’s dominance of streaming video and web advertising.
“Media CDN marks a further expansion of the [Google parent company] Alphabet empire, in this instance by commercializing the pipes that YouTube uses to deliver streaming video,” Schmitt told TechCrunch via email. “TV and video content providers that choose to build on Google’s Media CDN technology can expect top notch scalability. On the flip side, prospective customers must weigh the risks of becoming technically dependent on Google for advertising delivery, and ultimately perhaps even commercially dependent on it for ad sales and measurement, as Google builds out linkages between its cloud offerings and its advertising software products.”
