3Crowd Technologies, a startup providing technology that helps publishers manage content delivery in the cloud, announced that it has made its CrowdDirector product generally available today. And as proof that the technology works, 3Crowd said it has signed up Break Media and Revision3 as customers, after they participated in the beta trial of the technology.
3Crowd was started by Bitgravity co-founder Barrett Lyon, and provides a management layer for delivering content across multiple CDNs and cloud services. Using CrowdDirector, publishers can set rules to ensure the quality of service of their file delivery, while also managing to lower the costs of content delivery. At the same time, CrowdDirector takes away the possibility of a “single point of failure” if a customer’s CDN provides sub-par performance, and enables publishers to have a better idea of CDN performance, solving delivery issues in real-time by balancing between CDNs and web servers when necessary.
For video providers, the ability to guarantee quality of service while lowering CDN costs is an attractive proposition, which is how the startup was able to sign up Revision3 and Break Media. The startup charges a small fee to publishers based on the number of requests that CrowdDirector manages for them.
While up until now, 3Crowd’s technology was focused primarily on managing delivery across multiple CDNs, there’s the possibility that the technology may (at some point) help them avoid CDNs altogether. On its website 3Crowd notes that the CrowdDirector technology can be used to manage a private or “virtual” CDN themselves. With CrowdDirector as the management layer, publishers can use any type of network resource, whether it be a CDN, caching server in a data center or a server in their own network, to deliver content.
3Crowd raised a $6.6 million Series A financing round from Canaan Partners and Storm Ventures in April. The company also raised an angel round late last year from Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson, Storm Ventures and Greenwich Technology Associates.
Related content on GigaOM Pro: Report: Delivering Content in the Cloud (subscription required)
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