I’m not one to speculate on the stock market much, but I just saw that Limelight Networks is going public on Friday. It’s the first IPO in a while that I actually know something about the business. Disney uses Limelight for all of the on-demand video on ABC.com (full episode viewer stuff) and so far they’ve been happy.

On top of that, this is an industry that should get stronger. So much of scalability should be repeatable (hence my interest in starting FrequentMod), and companies like Limelight and Akamai will be the best positioned to help deliver the Internet streaming future that we’re all hoping for.

The only thing I wonder about is whether any of these companies can deliver a solution like Amazon’s EC2 in a distributed manner. There are a number of problems where having compute in the cloud (as opposed to on the edge) makes a lot of sense. Having something self-service like Amazon’s service with Akamai’s distribution would be even better.

Looking forward to seeing how LLNW does on Friday.