BitGravity wants to shake up video delivery industry

Perry Wu, a former venture capitalist at Palo Alto venture firm ComVentures and Barrett Lyon, a denial of service attack specialist, have joined forces to launch another player in the content delivery network (CDN) industry.

The company, called BitGravity, is still secretive, and Wu isn’t providing any details on its technology or on number of employees, but it is self-funded, and has won several customers, he tells VentureBeat. He began work on BitGravity earlier this year. He’s scored Revision3 as a customer, and some bigger customers in the publishing industry, he assures us, though he can’t disclose them publicly. The company boasts the ability to deliver video from publishers to end users quicker than other services, so that there is no latency when you click on a video or other file to watch it — but we note that VentureBeat hasn’t confirmed any of this. Here are the founders’ backgrounds. Wu has a background in peer-to-peer. Barrett Lyon, his co-founder has worked closely with various carriers. BitGravity is beginning to raise a round of venture capital.

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The explosion of video transmission makes this area attractive. Akamai, the industry leader, competes with several other players, such as Limelight, Mirror Image, Panther Express (see our story) and Itiva and Grid Networks, most of which we’ve written about. However, there is plenty of room for more innovative players.

(Aside: Wu is just one more of several people to have left ComVentures recently. Cliff Higgerson and David Helfrich, both very well regarded, have departed from the firm, which hasn’t done to well — in part because of its focus on the badly hit communications sector. Another partner, Jim McLean, recently joined 3i. Wu and McLean joined ComVentures in 2000 after they’d merged their $100 million fund Basis Ventures, with the firm. In retrospect, the merger with ComVentures wasn’t that great a move, Wu says, though he adds he left the partnership on good terms. ComVentures has since hired several partners, including Jeb Miller, Baris Karadogan and Keyur Patel.)

Seperately, Wu is creating an incubator, currently named Epiphany Partners. Aside from BitGravity, the incubator is working on two other secretive ideas, he said. Wu is funding the projects himself.