Blackwave brings enterprise-capable video delivery platform to market

Internet video storage and delivery company Blackwave is coming to market with its second major project since its launch three years ago. The Acton, Mass.-based company said its Blackwave Chorus video delivery platform provides enterprise-class software suitable for the massive delivery requirements of very larger Internet content providers, including content publishers, video aggregators, telcos, wireless network operators, Cable/IPTV providers and Content Delivery Networks.

Blackwave CEO Bob Rizika said the new platform would help the company continue to develop its global market.

"The Blackwave Chorus platform sets a new standard that provides the high performance and resiliency that major customers demand while also dramatically reducing their capital and operational expenditures," said Rizika in a prepared statement. "We are having enormous success with Blackwave Chorus at large-scale customer implementations in Japan and South Korea with blue-ribbon customers like SkillUpJapan and Shinsegae.  The Chorus platform puts us at the forefront of the global market for ultra-fast distribution of high-quality video content over the Internet."

Forrester analyst Henry Dewing agreed; he told FierceOnlineVideo Blackwave's recent wins in Asia helped validate the technology.

"I believe that the announcement and delivery of the new Blackwave Chorus video delivery solution promises to enable Blackwave to increase penetration of large file video content delivery market," Dewing said. "The capability of their solution is endorsed - and their market success will be powered - by the types of relationships they are developing in Asia with the likes of SkillupJapan, Biglobe, Shinsegae, Mitsubishi, N2, and Toshiba." The company recently opened offices in Tokyo and Seoul and has signed major customer and partner agreements in both countries, where it feels it can develop a solid leadership position as a provider of advanced video delivery solutions for Japanese and South Korean corporate customers and reseller partners.

The base of Blackwave's Chorus is software that optimizes what is essentially off-the-shelf hardware. "We take commodity parts and get near solid-state speed out of data-class drives," CTO Mike Kilian told FierceOnlineVideo. "In Japan, we've already been able to complete a deployment with a customer where we took 20 racks of servers and replace them with one rack of Blackwave servers."

With Chorus, he said, that deployment would experience enterprise-class reliability.

"We've made this appliance software combination truly enterprise class," he said. "Any component can fail and the system will continue to deliver content. All of the disc drives are self-healing and they use slack capacity for managing repairs. It's fully automated."

It's also a key to being able to assure high-quality video delivery while keeping opex and capex as low as possible.

"In the high end of the content distribution market for VOD in HD or even SD you have three options today--host in-house and overbuild and overprovision your compute, storage, and bandwidth infrastructure--requiring you pay out very big bucks, outsource the content to a CDN and pay lots of money to those CDNs, or host in-house and use Blackwave," Michael Peterson, chairman of GoDigital Media Group told FierceOnlineVideo. "Blackwave's approach to content performance optimization revolutionizes content hosting and provisioning for large scale on-demand services, allowing companies to regain cost control and improve operating efficiencies. Reducing complexity, cost, and improving efficiency is incredibly valuable to all companies in today's economy."

Chorus has taken a couple of years to bring to market because, Kilian said, Blackwave wanted to make sure it was truly robust. "We want to be sure that whatever fails, whether somebody trips over a cord or puts a bullet through a server, it will continue to deliver content."

Kilian said the company has made inroads in Asia, and expect to continue, partially because of the difference in the delivery architecture between North America and Asia. There, Blackwave is seen as being a bigger piece of the puzzle than they are in the U.S.

"In Asia, they see us as the whole delivery system, almost a CDN in a box," he said.

Kilian said the company is anticipating increasing interest in the U.S. marketplace from telcos and cable companies as they try and reign in-and monetize-over the top delivery. "They're losing revenue because OTT currently takes it away from them. They have to figure that out, and, since we support all three screens out of one platform, we've become part of the possible solution."

He said the company already is beginning to probe deeper into the Tier 1 space but knows Blackwave needs partners before it'll be taken seriously. "I can't expect to go to Verizon as a start up and try to sell them," he said. Nonetheless, he believes that early conversations with some major partner will go a long way toward getting the company closer to its goal. "In a ‘five-nines' kind of space, you need to have partners that the big players are comfortable with," Kilian said. "I'm hopeful we can bring that sort of deal to market before the end of the year."

For more:
- see this release

Related article:
Blackwave releases first production device, signs CDNetworks