One of the newer issues that IT managers frequently find themselves dealing with is the rise of video as a core element of the IT environment. Companies are increasingly incorporating video in their Web sites in the form of advertising content or customer-generated testimonials, while also beginning to use it as a mainstream communications tool.

The rise of video puts a lot more stress on the network, and to accommodate it a lot of organizations have turned to content delivery networks such as Akamai or Brightcove to help make sure video content gets delivered with high production values. At the same time, internet service providers across the board have noticed the rise of video on their networks. Many of them would like to able to service the rising demand for video bandwidth, which has given rise to all kinds of speculation about any one of the major telecommunication providers buying either Akamai or Brightcove.

Stepping into the middle of this developing drama is a company called Fliqz, which is essentially selling a video arbitrage service in competition to traditional CDN providers. Fliqz is not designed to compete head-to-head with CDNs in terms of raw performance. Instead, Fliqz is aimed at mid-market customers that have a need for video hosting solutions, but are adverse to all the commitment costs associated with traditional CDNs and have less need for absolute levels of raw performance.

Fliqz buys bandwidth from telecommunications carriers and CDNs and makes it available to customers through a standard application it has developed to run video. In effect, customers get to benefit from the huge bandwidth investments made by the telecommunications carriers while making little in the way of total commitment. As video continues to evolve in corporate computing, customers are going to want to see a different cost structure than the one that was originally developed for Web 2.0 companies that need dedicated access to video bandwidth.

Over time that means that providers of CDN services and telecommunications carriers are going to have to get more flexible about pricing as the advent of companies such as Fliqz point the way to the create of a more open, on-demand model for delivering video.