Digital Island Inks Sony Deal.

Digital Island has cut a deal with Sony Pictures to provide high- speed network infrastructure and management for Sony's entertainment web site. The site has video clips and information about Sony's film and movie properties. Digital Island owns a private network that's supposed to boost reliability and performance of web content and streaming media.

The company's chief media officer Adam Cohen won't talk about the financial terms of the Sony deal, but says the company charges by the gigabyte, roughly $21 for every gigabyte transmitted. He says Digital Island has 327 Internet access points and 2,600 servers sprinkled around the globe. What that means is that content is distributed across the 2,600 servers, and when a consumer requests content, it zips from the server, through the private network, and out onto the Internet through the nearest access point. Cohen said that the company has deals with AOL and a bunch of other ISPs to install an access point inside the ISP's network, which means content coming from Digital Media will never touch the real Internet, insuring an even faster ride.

Cohen called Digital Island's network two-way, meaning that consumers can send data through the network as fast as they can receive it, fast enough for voice-over-IP, and in fact, the company uses the network for its own long distance calls. It's also fast enough to deliver megabit-quality video. If somebody's using a video codec like Microsoft's Windows Media with a bit rate of a megabit a second, then it's possible to deliver video that's high-def television-quality and has six-channel surround sound.

The company also some Internet geographic mapping technology that can convert an IP address into a physical location. Cohen says Digital Island customers can use the geographic mapping to restrict content to a specific destitution, such as confining movie downloads to a certain country.

Unhappily Digital Island and rival Akamai are suing each other in patent disputes. In December, a jury in a federal court found Digital Island infringed on a patent owned by Akamai. In a separate simultaneous trial, a jury found that Akamai did not infringe on a Digital Island patent. The damages Digital Island must pay will be the subject of a separate trial.