The new offering will enable CenturyLink to deliver media and entertainment companies a more scalable, highly-available and secure way to improve the management and delivery of their content on a global scale.
"Providing high-performance, geographically-diverse origin storage is critical to achieving great user experiences when attempting to reach global audiences – particularly when it comes to serving fast-growing regions like Latin America and Asia-Pacific," said Bill Wohnoutka (pictured), vice president of global internet and content delivery solutions for CenturyLink. "IBM Cloud Object Storage combined with CenturyLink's rapidly expanding global CDN footprint offers our customers a scalable, highly-available and resilient option to improve user experience for content delivery globally."
As media viewership grows and people increasingly prefer to consume entertainment on mobile devices, media and entertainment companies are rethinking how they can support and deliver greater volumes of high-quality content to customers worldwide. With reports from Cisco, in its Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2017–2022 White Paper, indicating content delivery networks (CDNs) will carry 72% of internet traffic by 2022, the need for a hybrid cloud approach that includes cloud-based storage and workflows to support that growth has peaked.
In response to this IBM Cloud Object Storage offers CenturyLink customers a central, resilient and scalable solution that users can be confident in moving content securely and quickly. In addition, the solution can manage content libraries of almost any size for seamless management and delivery.
"The media and entertainment industry faces unique challenges today in the way content is consumed and the sheer volume of data that must be transferred at any moment," added Phil Buckellew, general manager of IBM Cloud Object Storage and Databases. "With the integration of IBM Cloud Object Storage, CenturyLink can now offer its customers even more options in how they move and manage their data across environments. This kind of hybrid cloud approach is critical as they look to keep pace with booming viewership and shifting preferences."
The news comes as part of a number of announcements from CenturyLink. Earlier this month, the company launched its global mesh content delivery platform in partnership with Steamroot. The company also connected its Vyvx suite of fibre-based broadcast services to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
