And you all thought that Verizon was just aiming to cover its own customers and network with content? Well, apparently we were all wrong. It seems that they've dropped a pretty large penny, $370M worth of them in fact, in working out a streaming video content delivery system and video ad platform that will reach the web and mobile users with no word on limiting it to just their own consumers.

The deal is that it will pair up video streams from a variety of content suppliers with complementary advertising and then pack it all off through the 'Net. It's nothing groundbreaking, I mean we've got all sorts of this going on right now. The question is, why are they doing it and what's the deal?

Essentially, it's a Verizon-powered content delivery network that seems aimed at enterprise-sized customers. Check out this list of features.

Verizon Digital Media Services has 30 data centers presumably round the world to get the data to consumers as fast as possible via its internal backbone running at 40-100Gbps.

It seems to be a full-fledged CDN by the looks of it including; optimized delivery speed and bitrate (though they seem to obfuscate that all with a bit more flowery wording), automated transcoding, DRM, delivery, and capture, track, and analyze customer transactions and digital media consumption. Generate reports to support advertising campaigns and cross-platform, one-to-one advertising experiences.

The interesting thing is that it's already got video advertising built in both with contextualized, dynamic ad insertion and advanced targeting. So it seems like they really thought this through, have the infrastructure and the pipelines. On top of that, they also have some advanced features on the consumer side like multiple-screen media consumption and the ability to pause on one device and resume play on another.

About the Author - Christophor Rick

Christophor Rick is a freelance writer specializing in technology, new media, video games, IPTV, online video advertising and consumer electronics. His past work has included press releases, copy-writing, travel writing and journalism. He also writes novel-length and short fiction as part of Three-Faced Media . View All Posts By - Christophor Rick