An interesting little deal about something we didn’t even know existed… Absolute Radio‘s content delivery network (CDN), dubbed the Golden Square Network, is being acquired by CDN operator Ipercast.
Absolute predecessor Virgin Radio was the first radio station in Europe to begin webcasting.
The arrangement will see Ipercast manage the network for Absolute, but it seems it will also get to use it for much more – Ipercast says it will “position itself as a technology partner for web radio and other broadcast, media and telecoms companies”.
For the eight-year-old, Paris-based company, whose website you can’t read if you don’t have Silverlight installed, it means growing its content delivery network’s international footprint, and targeting the UK.
The CDN market, of course, is already dominated by Level3, Akamai (NSDQ: AKAM) and Limelight, each of which are used by BBC’s iPlayer, for example, so Ipercast will have some ground to make up, but there’s still plenty of growth left in online video custom.
Absolute, in the release, tells us its CDN “spans multiple countries with peering connectivity in London, Manchester, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, New York and Los Angeles” and streams 150TB of content every month for Absolute stations alone.
The disposal, which seems to amount also to an outsourcing, “leaves us free to concentrate on developing the best possible content and services”, says Absolute’s technology head Paul Brown.