BitGravity Launches New CDN Network

The content delivery market continues to attract new players, creating more choice for content providers and more competition for existing CDNs. The latest entry is BitGravity, which is touting next-generation infrastructure and has gotten a high-profile review from TechCrunch upon its launch.

BitGravity's early media notices mention CEO Perry Wu, who has built numerous startups working at Accel Partners and elsewhere in the venture capital economy. But the network security community will be familiar with the work of the company's other co-founder, Barrett Lyon, who has industrial-strength traffic management experience. Lyon is a pioneer in defending against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, and founded the leading provider in the field, Prolexic. If you're not familiar with Barrett's work, you can read about it The New Yorker and Wired.

BitGravity says its technology targets network latency ("lag") to provide quicker and smoother delivery of online video. "Video plays smoothly without stalling or choppiness; audio files start instantly, as if they were on your hard drive; software downloads are fast and achieve high completion rates," the company says. BitGravity's marquee client is Revision 3, which serves up the DiggNation and GigaOm shows. TechCrunch says the company has accepted a seed round of capital but isn't talking about how much was raised.

The debut of BitGravity is likely to add to concerns that the CDN sector is getting crowded, a trend that analysts believe may erode market share and profit margins at market leader Akamai (AKAM) and second banana Limelight Networks (LLNW). As we noted earlier today, both stocks got hammered in the third quarter.