The content delivery landscape has shifted substantially since our 2023 presentation titled "Embedded CDNs in 2023﹣A status", and the pace of change shows no sign of slowing. This talk revisits the CDN ecosystem three years on, focusing on three intertwined developments: structural change in static content delivery, the rise of live streaming as a dominant traffic class, and the resulting operational pressure on service providers.
On the static side, the market has consolidated and reorganized. Dominant legacy players are now delivering a significantly larger share of their traffic through a combination of on-net caches and their own backbone networks, while several previously prominent CDNs have either exited the market or been absorbed through acquisition. Open-caching models that had begun to mature now face an unclear future amid this shifting landscape. Meanwhile, a new wave of entrants is reshaping how edge capacity is sourced, deployed, and monetized — challenging incumbents and introducing novel approaches to edge infrastructure
In the live streaming segment we see continued growth in the number of live events that are streamed to ever increasing audience sizes. In this talk we'll examine what operators are doing to keep up and if their methods are effective.
And finally, it wouldn't be 2026 without a look into the growth of AI services and we'll look to see if the massive growth rates has any impact on content delivery.