Content Peering Goes Live As Key Player Backpedals

Content Bridge, an ambitious alliance for Internet content "peering," went live today, but the news was overshadowed by founding member Adero's withdrawal as billing and settlement partner for the group.

Content Bridge aims to cut end-user download times for video and other graphically intensive content by pooling cache servers from service and infrastructure providers worldwide. Members of the alliance include such networking and hosting heavyweights as America Online, Exodus and Genuity. The alliance also hopes to give customers more fine-grained detail on what consumers are downloading from their sites.

Content Bridge is somewhat analogous to ISP traffic peering. The group hopes to create not only economies of scale, but also a set of common caching rules that will allow members to freely move content between networks.

Adero said it will remain a member of the alliance but is selling all its billing partner assets for the alliance to Inktomi, a content distribution vendor and the leading mover behind Content Bridge. The sale netted Adero $23.5 million cash.

Adero COO Rick Williams said Adero remains committed to the ideals and goals of Content Bridge. He called the decision to drop out as billing partner "difficult." Williams said Adero has decided to use its resources to expand its existing content distribution network and resell services to the carriers, ISPs and other service providers. "There is such a market for content distribution services now, particularly in Europe and Asia, that it really made sense for us to concentrate on that part of our business," said Williams. "It's just one of those decisions that you have to make to focus the business."

In a separate announcement today, Inktomi said Content Bridge entered production today. January had been the target date for the system to debut in limited service, and Williams said Adero completed all testing and trials of the billing and settlement system for Content Bridge on time.

Inktomi's move to establish Content Bridge last year was widely seen as an attempt to compete with Akamai, which reportedly controls as much as 80 percent of the content distribution market.

Analysts strongly endorsed the idea of content peering, but there have been strong reservations among some experts about the huge task of tracking and billing for content as it moves between member networks.