. the 8.5 million viewers in Germany) is highly inefficient. It is clearly better to copy the content to a local server in, for example, Berlin from where it may be streamed to the viewers in Germany. This clearly saves significant bandwidth in long-distance telecommunications between Brazil and Germany, and results in lower costs. Delivery from a local server also facilitates regulatory and business compliance as some content may not be legally authorised in a particular country in its original format. Furthermore, local delivery allows for value additions such as adding subtitles or dubbing voice-overs. Bringing the content close to consumers is nowadays a common practice and applies to both content as well as software upgrades. The companies which facilitate this are known as content delivery networks or CDNs. A prominent example is Akamai Technologies Inc. with more than 37000 servers in 87 countries which mirror data streams from global content providers. The value to content providers is a better quality of service and faster content delivery. They also save significantly from lower long distance packet transmission charges. This value proposition earned Akamai a revenue in excess of $1.5 billion in 2013-2014. Content and services layer Connectivity retail layer Infrastructure layer Subscriber/end-user Broadband retailers and infrastructure providers are well positioned to implement and provide content delivery. Their edge switches and routers can be fitted with buffers to mirror content to deliver to their subscribers. This is one way they can earn revenue from content provision. Case Study Questions What are the drivers for video-on-demand content delivery? What is the challenge with streaming (video) content to a very large number of end-users? How do content distribution companies address these challenges? What is a mirror site and what is the value it provides? How can retail layer players provide CDN services? Broadband Telecommunications Technologies and Management Network Neutrality Network neutrali