Nokeena Makes Internet TV More Like TV

You sure as heck wouldn’t take it if your TV stuttered and crapped out, but on the web your expectations are significantly lower. As online video matures, there’s a growing opportunity to bring the web quality of experience up to TV levels. We want to take a moment to mention Nokeena, a startup that came out of stealth earlier this week with a video delivery software appliance addressing exactly this issue.

The company aims to ensure reliable high-quality video streams at a lower cost by better managing changes in demand, end users’ connection speeds and network conditions. Nokeena’s Media Flow Director works on commodity hardware, including what customers are already using. That server-side approach isn’t exactly like anything else in the market, but it’s in good company with many other new “smooth” video streaming products from the likes of biggies like Akamai, Microsoft and Adobe and startups like Swarmcast and Move Networks.

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Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nokeena claims it can cut customers’ video delivery expenses by as much as 65 percent while requiring only a 10th of the number of servers as normal. The company supports all different streaming formats and platforms, unlike some other solutions which are tied to certain protocols or hardware. Some techniques used include storing files in a way that avoids fragmentation interfering with delivery, and moving cached content to different tiers depending on demand (see the explanatory chart above, which is sorely in need of some directional arrows)

Nokeena is first targeting publishers and CDNs. Launch customer Break Media is using Nokeena to ensure that its premium content streams are reliable and high-quality, because that’s what’s bringing in its advertising dollars.

We’d previously written about Nokeena last year when it raised $8.7 million from Clearstone Venture Partners (where it was incubated), Trinity Ventures and angels.

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