MLB.com Expands Relationship with Level 3

June 29th, 2010 by · 1 Comment

The market may not be showing much love for Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) these days, but professional sports broadcasters sure seems happy with them.  Yesterday we heard about the streaming of World Cup matches over in Europe, and today we’re back across the Atlantic with an expanded deal with MLB.com, the official site of Major League Baseball.  MLB.com has had a relationship with Level 3 for CDN services in the past, but that has now expanded to include colocation and high speed IP services as well.  

In particular, Level 3 will be providing two 10GigE ports and will be hosting MLB.com’s network infrastructure and media library in its Gateway facilities.  This seems to be a case where Level 3’s ownership of the network allowed it to make an offer that CDN competitors like Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM, news, filings) and Limelight Networks (NASDAQ:LLNW, news, filings) can’t really match.  That is of course what the network operator had in mind when it entered the content delivery business, but there is still a long way to go to make a real dent in Akamai’s dominance.

Level 3’s PR department sure has had a busy year thus far.  It’s almost as if the company is trying to propel itself out of last year’s malaise by sheer force of will.  We’ll see in a few weeks just how the second quarter went.  

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Categories: Content Distribution · Datacenter · Internet Backbones

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  • Anonymous says:

    Last quarter it was all the voice deals, this quarter it is the CDN deals. Market is not believing it today. Since those guys don’t give quarterly guidance, a pre-release in either direction is doubtful so I guess we wait until the last week of July to see if there was any revenue behind some of these deals.

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