As CDNs try to evade commodification, they’re looking outward to bring more value-added services to their clients. To that end, Limelight Networks today announced its first-ever acquisition: dynamic video and audio ad insertion startup Kiptronic, which to date had raised $9 million in funding. Dan Rayburn reports that the value of the deal is around $12 million, but while Limelight says that’s inaccurate it’s declined to offer up an alternate figure.

Last year Akamai also bought an ad startup — aCerno, for behavioral advertising. Kiptronic handles targeting, too, but its focus is dynamically delivered ads to media in any environment — on a mobile device, on consoles, online or offline. It’s possible this could turn into a play for Limelight to use its precise content delivery information to power localized advertising on any device.

Starting today, enterprise customers can get all the bandwidth for high-definition video they need from AT&T, which has launched a private content delivery service for video inside company firewalls. The explosion of video inside corporate networks is straining resources, according to the carrier. But unlike the tiered service that AT&T is experimenting with for its last-mile consumer networks, it’s offering enterprise customers a service that helps them track, compress and prioritize video traffic within the network.

AT&T explains pretty clearly why this is necessary in its release:

“On the average business day, about one-third of the more than 17 petabytes of traffic traversing AT&T’s global backbone network is video content. A mere three years ago, video content traversing the AT&T network produced barely a blip,” said Roman Pacewicz, senior vice president of strategy and application services, AT&T Business Solutions.

AT&T, rather than become a dumb pipe that acts solely as a conduit for the video deluge, is hoping to monetize that video traffic. Continue »

Voxel, the managed hosting provider, has built its own cloud computing product called SilverLining that will compete with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud and Rackspace’s CloudServers products. Thanks to its managed hosting business, Voxel plans to offer the same hybrid strategy that both Rackspace and ServePath offer, which combines dedicated servers with cloud computing for spikes in traffic or one-off projects. Continue »