New Net Venture Aims to Eliminate Download Logjams

Netscape veterans Marc Andressen and James Barksdale are lending their clout and cash to a new company with the goal of streamlining the delivery of bandwidth-hogging video and audio files over the Internet.

Venture-funded Kontiki launches today, starting a business it says will enable owners of rich media content such as audio and video to lower the cost of distributing their wares while maintaining reliable connections to servers and added security.

Kontiki is backed by the Barksdale Group and Benchmark Capital and was founded by Netscape alums Mike Homer, Kontiki’s chief executive, and Wade Hennessy, the chief technology officer. Andressen co-founded Netscape and heads Loudcloud, a Web services firm.

Kontiki’s software will take advantage of slow periods of Internet traffic to download audio and video to end users, who would schedule times to view or hear files using a desktop application provided by the company.

The Internet fervor over streaming media has yet to progress past small, jerky video files and low-quality audio broadcasts, something Kontiki executives say they hope to change by employing software that manages and routes those files more smoothly.

“The whole experience around rich media on the Internet right now suffers from a bunch of different problems,” said Tony Espinoza, the company’s vice president of products and services. “The quality is really low and the experience isn’t great.”

With Kontiki’s software network, content owners will be able to better oversee the distribution of their materials and charge for it as necessary. Kontiki’s desktop program will allow users to schedule one-time deliveries of large content files by downloading the media in off-peak hours.

The company’s software will support existing multimedia file types such as Microsoft’s Windows Media and Apple’s Quicktime, Espinoza said.

“[Kontiki’s network] allows the provider to create the subscriptions and manage all the billing,” Espinoza said. The patent-pending software would wrap video and audio files in a blanket of digital security features to “keep it secure so that the users aren’t going to be able to burn it to a CD or something and send it to a friend.”

He anticipates movie studio trailers and record company song releases benefiting from Kontiki services.

That positions Kontiki as something less than a peer-to-peer network solution where files are shared among end users, and more as a management intermediary, routing large computers’ files around Internet congestion that often plagues the streaming-media business sector.

Digital Island and Akamai offer similar services that increase the speed at which its clients’ Web pages and media files download from the Internet.

JP Morgan H&Q; analyst Jack Ripsteen has followed Kontiki’s development through the company’s early stealth mode incarnation as Zodiac Networks. He sees the possibility for the new company to lower bandwidth costs for entertainment and corporate customers looking for online solutions for media distribution.

He, too, shot down the notion that streaming media could scale successfully with the high cost of peak-hour bandwidth use on the Internet for content providers.

“Streaming is highly inefficient in a lot of regards. It requires a persistent network connection, so it makes quality fairly difficult to always ensure,” Ripsteen said. “It costs money, because as much as bandwidth costs are falling, it’s not free. And the notion that it’s secure is disputable.”

The cost-efficiency portion of Kontiki’s offerings should make the company’s service inviting for content owners, Ripsteen said.

“It’s all bits and it all needs to be transported, and economically,” he said.

Kontiki said it would give further information about customers and partnerships within the next two months.