Lumen teams up with J-Stream to offer CDN services in Japan

After boosting its content delivery network (CDN) capabilities in key APAC markets, Lumen announced it's working with J-Stream to deliver CDN services in Japan.

Lumen said the new partnership with J-Stream, which first launched streaming services in Japan in 1997, would enable both companies to better serve the requirements of corporations, broadcasters, OTT operators and video gaming companies in Japan that require large-scale, global distribution of their content.

Driven by the increasing number of internet subscribers and the consumption of video content over smartphones and other portable devices, the Asia-Pacific CDN market has been red hot. According to IDC, the CDN market in Asia-Pacific and Japan was projected to increase by close to 32% year-over-year in 2020, which would mark its highest growth spurt to date.

In order to support the increased demand, Lumen recently doubled its CDN footprint in APAC markets by increasing its capacity in 11 major cities across the region. In Japan, Lumen, which was formerly known as CenturyLink, has local points of presence in Osaka and Tokyo, as well as an in-country network operations center (NOC).  Lumen's CDN portfolio supports video and web delivery, mesh delivery technology, multi-CDN orchestration, digital download optimization, high-performance object-based storage, as well as edge computing. The Lumen CDN used by nine of the world's 10 largest media companies.  

"Together with J-Stream, we aim to help customers in Japan deliver their rich content to audiences and users globally, reliably and successfully," said Melissa Margolius, senior director for wholesale sales, Asia Pacific in a statement. "Customers will be able to tap into Lumen's high-performance, extensive global delivery network and benefit from our edge-based service offerings and key features like our object storage capabilities.

"In recent months, we have also expanded our global delivery models, especially across Asia Pacific and Latin America, to enable our customers to deliver their content in some of the hardest to reach locations in the world."

J-Stream was the first company in Japan to offer streaming services in 1997. In addition to bringing its knowledge of the local markets into the partnership with Lumen, J-Stream has its own CDN for offering end-to-end video business solutions to customers. J-Stream claims to have the largest market share in the Japanese online video platform market.

RELATED: CenturyLink snaps up OTT video delivery vendor Streamroot

Two years ago, CenturyLink bought privately held OTT video distributor Streamroot to help it improve video and static content delivery within bandwidth-constrained areas, and strengthen its content delivery network (CDN) and edge computing services. Also in 2019, CenturyLink launched a new CDN platform for web developers.