In the past, we also chided the White House for seemingly giving preferential treatment to YouTube over other video streaming services, but it looks like privacy concerns were the main reason for this weekend's switch. Because Google uses long-term tracking cookies whenever somebody watches a video, the White House's web site was breaking the federal government's strict rules about using cookies on government sites - at least until the White House issued itself an exemption from these rules.

As Chris Soghoian notes, the timing of this move is somewhat odd, as YouTube just rolled out a new feature called delayed cookies, which lets those who embed a video decide if they want to allow Google to set a non-session cookie when others are watching the embedded video. However, it seems like this move came just a bit too late for the White House.

Of course, the White House will continue to post the video addresses on YouTube as well, but thanks to this new solution, the White House website will not set a cookie on your machine every time you play an embedded video anymore.

New Player

Even though YouTube is the de-facto standard for web video today, visitors to the White House web site won't have to miss out on most of YouTube's most compelling features. The new player allows for videos to be embedded or to be downloaded as an MP4 file. Videos can also be played back in full-screen mode and feature captions in English and Spanish. Interestingly, the player now also features a new link: 'also available here,' which currently points to the White House's page on Vimeo. While this is nice, it would also be nice if this link actually pointed to the wide range of services that the White House uploads the weekly address to. Another complaint we have is that the new embeds now automatically start playing whenever a page is opened, without the option to turn this off.

Just like Amazon's S3 and E2 shook up the market for online storage and cloud computing, this new CDN solution will surely drive down the prices for content delivery. At first, however, Amazon's new service will not support streaming video or live broadcasts. Because of this, Akamai and Limelight don't have to fear the competition with Amazon just yet, but we would be surprised if Amazon did not add more video specific features to its CDN in the future.

Preemptive Move

Interestingly, as Om Malik points out, New-York based Voxel just announced a CDN solution based on S3. Amazon rarely pre-announces new services, so we definitely agree that this announcement today should be seen as a preemptive move by Amazon.

With a $550 million market cap, Limelight is certainly in Microsoft's price range. Why would Microsoft want Limelight? Henry Blodget suspects it has to do with beefing up Microsoft's cloud computing technology an capacity.

"Microsoft's entire business infrastructure is built around desktop servers and PCs. The entire business infrastructure of Microsoft's most fearsome competitor Google, meanwhile, is built around the wave of the future-- "cloud computing"--in which millions of devices interact with vast data centers and server farms out on the network.

Microsoft certainly doesn't need to be in the CDN business, but perhaps it believes Limelight's infrastructure and expertise will help accelerate its transition to cloud computing. Specifically, instead of buying CDN services from Akamai, et al, Microsoft could now float MSN, Office Live, Silverlight, and other Software-As-A-Service products on top of the Limelight infrastructure." -- Henry Blodget

But even as the rumor mill churns, Microsoft is reportedly building their own content delivery network, even though the August deal with Limelight also included a multi-year extension of the agreement the two companies already had in place for Limelight to provide content serving for Microsoft media properties.

"Right now we're actually building our own edge network," said Debra Chrapaty, Corporate Vice President of Global Foundation Services for Microsoft, at a recent conference, reports Rich Miller. "We're going to put nodes all over the world that we can leverage a little more broadly than we could by using a partner."

"We're architecting one of the world's largest networks," said Chrapaty. "In environments like ours, we could look at network costs, if we continue to scale and support the world's data, in the billions of dollars. The numbers are really enormous." Weighed against the potential cost of Microsoft's data delivery needs (according to Miller, Microsoft's media properties serve 460 million unique users per month), purchasing Limelight seems like small potatoes.

So which is it? Is Microsoft building their own delivery network using licensed Limelight technology or are they purchasing Limelight as the basis for their new network? I think purchasing Limelight would make a lot of sense for Microsoft -- it would probably be cheaper then building their own content delivery network from scratch, and who knows Limelight's technology better than Limelight?

The why is simple. As Dan Rayburn wrote in August, "Microsoft knows very well that what we are experiencing today with content delivery is only scratching the surface of where this business is going to go. They know that a few years from now this will truly be a powerful medium for delivering all kinds of video content and Microsoft wants to prepare now by making their platform ready for when it does hit." That's why Microsoft would buy Limelight. It's the "will they" that is the trickier question.