BSKYB SELECTS DIGITAL ISLAND DISTRIBUTION

BSKYB have announced that they have expanded their capabilities to serve their news and sports content online by naming Digital Island as key service providers for global content distribution.
Digital Island, providers of managed Internet infrastructure, will support sky.com's distribution and streaming capabilities by delivering content worldwide including rich media, as well as text, through Digital Island's Footprint Content Delivery and Footprint On-Demand services.
BSkyB's Director of New Media, John Swingewood, said: "This partnership takes forward our drive to build a platform that allows users to access Sky's news and sports content on-demand across multiple devices. Digital Island's global streaming network will enhance sky.com's capability to handle high volumes across all platforms, even when breaking news or sports results generate peaks in traffic."
Video on-demand and live video streaming will be provided through Digital Island's extensive, global streaming network. Sky intends to increase and broaden their use of the Internet as a distribution platform for their extensive library of video footage.
Digital Island's Footprint content delivery optimises the routing and delivery of all kinds of content. Footprint maximises the quality of the end-user experience by increasing the speed and reliability of a web site. When a user anywhere in the world clicks on a popular page in sky.com, Footprint scans the Internet to find the shortest and fastest connection to that person's location. Footprint bypasses Internet congestion and guarantees fast and relevant interactions.
In November 2000, when more than nine million people accessed the Madonna performance from London's Brixton Academy via the Internet, Digital Island handled the lion's share of the 3.6 Terabytes of data through Footprint, making it one of the largest web events. These same techniques will be applied to the sky.com Web site for both video and other frequently used content. (CD)