Ocarina Reduces Bandwidth-Hungry Web Content for Internet

Ocarina Networks provides a substantial reduction of bandwidth-hungry digital web content for top Internet media companies through optimization workflows that reduce photos, video, HTML, log, and other files by as much as 75 percent, helping minimize costs while improving site responsiveness and customer loyalty.

In use by some of the largest social networking sites, including MySpace.com and Tagged.com, the Ocarina ECOsystem is a complete solution for optimizing digital web content. The company’s patent-pending algorithms reduce even previously compressed rich media files that can comprise the bulk of a social media site’s storage, including GIF, PNG, JPEG, h.264 and other image and video formats. By optimizing the millions of files uploaded by consumers each day, social networking companies can realize additional free space that can delay the need for additional storage purchases as well as reducing bandwidth needs for lower transmission costs.

"At Tagged, we’re expecting to double or triple our infrastructure each year, all while releasing new products and improving site performance," said Johann Schleier-Smith, Founder and CTO of Tagged, the third-largest social network in the U.S. and with more than 80 million members worldwide. "It’s a formidable challenge, and Ocarina is an important part of how we get there. For example, if we can reduce the size of our media files by 30 to 40%, our pages load noticeably faster, and that means customers stay on site longer."

ECOsystem gives customers two options for optimization workflows. The standard Ocarina compression workflow provides lossless compression using advanced Ocarina algorithms, and readback of files requires the use of ECOreader software, running on the Ocarina optimizer appliance or on customer servers.

The second workflow available to customers is called Native Format Optimization (NFO). The NFO workflow provides non-visual compression for images and h.264 Flash video files while preserving the native file format (GIF, JPG or FLV). Thus files optimized using the NFO workflow may be served directly to end-users without the need for decompression, and web sites capture the additional benefits of bandwidth reduction. The NFO workflow includes the ‘visually identical’ policy setting that provides significant savings with no perceptible quality impact, by tuning media encoding parameters to align with the human visual system.

"Rich media files are playing an increasing role in the social media user experience and the cost in terms of storage and bandwidth is significant to these businesses," said Carter George, Vice President of Products at Ocarina. "We provide a substantial reduction in these types of files, which traditional dedupe solutions can’t reduce at all.  In an ad-driven business like social networking, every bit of storage and bandwidth reduction can provide significant returns."

To read the Tagged case study