This week at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, RCR caught up with one of the world’s largest ISPs, Level 3, which was touting its role as the messenger between content producers and gamers themselves.
At RCR, we are always hearing that people need and want more bandwidth, but Level 3 Communications says it’s not quite as simple as that, because people need “more than just a network.”
Enter Level 3 with its operator owned content delivery network, able to deliver games and game patches without (purportedly) clogging the pipelines.
The firm claims it isn’t just any old backhaul company, but instead says it goes that extra mile to provide connectivity between the game players and the game servers themselves, making the process a lot quicker and less painless.
For example, Level 3 boasts Crytek, makers of the visually intense Crysis game, as a customer and says it can also seamlessly stream 3D trailers over the network to viewers, whether they have a good connection or not.
This is apparently achieved by determining the speed of the end user’s connection and then working with Microsoft’s Silverlight to dynamically update the stream in order to feed the right level of content at the right moment, achieving a smooth, rather than jittery, experience.
Take a look at the video below for more details:
