Streaming Media - 2008 Industry Sourcebook - (Page 193) making a stickier Edgecast’s CDN keeps Jaman’s visitors on-site longer. cinema site by Nancy Davis Kho aman (www.jaman.com) is a destination site for people who want to discover, watch, and review movies from around the world. The company was founded in 2006 with the goal of pioneering the social aspects of an internet community built around independent and international media. Having curated and assembled one of the world’s largest online libraries of feature films and documentaries, Jaman provides filmmakers and studios a secure way to distribute and market films worldwide. With an inventory of more than 1,500 films, Jaman is the premier video download service for hard-to-find “world” cinema. Even before beta testing was completed, more than 150,000 users from more than 186 countries had visited Jaman in live demo mode to download movies. Through marketing initiatives designed to increase product awareness as the site moved out of beta, Jaman’s leadership team anticipated a sizeable traffic increase j over the coming year. In the face of this anticipated traffic, Jaman wanted to significantly increase the video download performance of its website worldwide by employing a third-party content delivery network (CDN). The goal was to make the site “stickier,” which would translate into improved revenue opportunities. The Business Challenge Jaman, founded by Informatica cofounder and former CEO Gaurav Dhillon, exists to bring global cinema to a global client base. The company combines the immediacy of internet downloads with social aspects of the interactive web, enabling visitors to browse the movie choices of other Jaman members, to post reviews, and, of course, to download movies from around the world that you probably won't be able to find at your local video store. Alec Chattaway, Jaman’s manager of hosted services, says that the choice of a CDN provider was of paramount importance from the company’s inception. He says, “It was imperative that our customers located in remote areas had the same short page load times as the ones situated near us.” Otherwise, the website's customers tended to “bounce” off the site, a potential sale deferred or community member lost. And with such a broad selection of world cinema, the users are just as likely to be located in Santiago, Chile, as San Jose, Calif. In evaluating potential CDN providers, Chattaway recalls that there were three major criteria. “Number one was reporting ability; we had to have access to exactly what our users were seeing, because we were ourselves still in beta mode and addressing product-related issues.” The second criterion was the usability of the provider; that is, the Jaman team wanted to feel confident that their questions and concerns would be addressed in the same week, if not the same day, that they were raised to the vendor. WWW.STREAMINGMEDIA.COM 193 case studies http://www.jaman.com http://WWW.STREAMINGMEDIA.COM
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