Content Delivery Networks

1Welcome

1.1 A Few Words of Introduction

I am literally buzzing from the past few days. When the team at Wiley got me involved in the previous title I worked on with them (Advanced Content Delivery, Streaming, and Cloud Services, 2014), I was feeling some way out of my comfort zone. I normally write extensive commentary around the streaming media and content delivery network sector for a variety of trade presses, and very much with a hands‐on tradeperson’s view. This was the first time I was to contribute some writing to the community among recognized academics: a notably different focus to the engineers in enterprises who read the trade press that has been my writing home for two decades.

While I am no academic, I was bought up at the knees of academics. My godfather was head of Maths and Physics at Sussex University for many years, and he was my favorite babysitter! The opportunity to build the first Mac network at the university in the mid‐1980s (unboxing the gift from Apple was a way to occupy a 9‐year‐old during a holiday), through to, at 17 in 1991, having a log‐in (including an email and remote access to the William Herschel Telescope) to Starlink, which was one of the early global IP networks, my teenage years were spent as a geek.

However, I left two different degree courses (Astrophysics and Artificial Intelligence) to pursue commercial ventures. I was typically always naturally more entrepreneurial and impatient more than patient and academic, so I wanted to get to ...