AxiomTV, VeriSign Partner on Family Videos

If you thought the digital video marketplace wasn’t already crowded enough, with several operations already up and running and several more looking to enter the market…the scene just gained onemore competitor, with AxiomTV entering into a partnership with domain registar VeriSign to offer a family-friendly digital video service distributed via VeriSign’s Intelligent Content Delivery Network (CDN).

VeriSign’s CDN is based on the company’s “widely deployed” Kontiki peer-to-peer sharing technology, which leverages the download-enhancing potentials of P2P technology while offering reliability and maintaining the media’s security. According to VeriSign, their CDN technology “fundamentally changes the economics of the broadband delivery of DVD-quality video”—although we’re sure BitTorrent will have something to say about their once their commercial video service goes live. Kontiki is already used by VeriSign partners like AOL, the BBC, and SkyTV.

“One of the greatest challenges media and entertainment companies face is how to meet the growing demand for more Internet-based content in an economically viable and secure manner,” said Todd Johnson, VeriSign’s VP for broadband content services, in a statement. “By leveraging the patented Kontiki peer-to-peer technology and the latest streaming technology, the VeriSign Intelligent CDN offers an end-to-end solution which enables our customers to choose the right viewer experience for each specific piece of content. For short previews and user generated content it is likely to be streamed, for long form content, it likely to be delivered with P2P.”

In addition to pre-screening content for “family friendly-ness,” AxiomTV and VeriSign will use a content filtering system dubbed “Mother” to screen out content containing vulgarity, violence, pornography, and other “inappropriate” content. The company has prelaunched a demo Web site so potential customers can get a glimpse of how the service might work. AxiomTV is expected to open for testing January 8, 2007, then go live on February 1, 2007. Axiom has released essentially no technical information on how the service will operate, save to say that users can download video to their computer and watch it on a television using a simple adapter. And they hint the service won’t be Windows-only, promoting QuickTime and the idea of using an Apple Mac mini, with remote, to store and control videos. No information on pricing or content parters has been released, although the preview site does promote several recent big-studio movie titles.