The video content delivery network BitGravity has landed a deal with Silicon Valley, space transportation venture SpaceX to livestream upcoming launches of its rockets from a camera attached to the outside of the vehicles.
While the tech community struggles with the financial frenzy, the year-old CDN is looking up, literally.
“We’re streaming, and they’re launching rockets. It’s kind of interesting to see that happen while massive budgets from other countries are involved doing this, and we’re just a couple of startup companies,” said BitGravity co-founder and CTO Barrett Lyon.
BitGravity, which claims to be the “first carrier-grade live video broadcasting solution for the Internet,” launched last fall, and introduced its live streaming product at the DEMO08 conference. In addition to clients such as Revision3 and The Tom Green Show, it is currently in talks with many of the major media companies and was picked up to stream the Democratic National Convention.
SpaceX is a commercial project that also has its roots in Silicon
Valley with Pay Pal founder Elon Musk. This past September, in its fourth attempt, SpaceX made history becoming the first private company to launch a rocket into orbit.
The two startups had worked together, unofficially, on the third and fourth launches of the Falcon 1 rocket to test the waters. Their first collaboration ended in disaster.
“The rocket rotates just ever so slightly and it’s just so smooth, and then you see the Earth kind of rotate when the camera’s actually rolling with the rocket. So it’s pretty amazing… and then the rocket blew up,” said Lyon.
BitGravity recently received $2.5 million in first-round funding from Allen and Company and Blake Krikorian, the co-founder and chief executive of Sling Media, the maker of the Sling box. Its biggest competitors in the CDN market include Akamai, Limelight and
CDNetworks.
SpaceX said they chose BitGravity for a number of reasons, including the low cost.
“It was competitive with the previous content delivery network, Akamai.
We’re not like ESPN, so we’re not doing events all the time,” said
SpaceX CIO Branden Spikes, who declined to reveal any of the financial details of the deal.
“It really came down to functionality and reliability,” he said.
The next SpaceX launch will take place around March of 2009.
