There are only so many times that you can launch a product, which is perhaps why Akamai is so visibly ignored in a publishing world obsessed by overnight sensations like the Apple iPhone.
Akamai has been launching its HD Network for at least two years to our knowledge, which is why it has spent the past three IBC conferences in Amsterdam telling us about it (we missed this year’s presentation). But then again when you have 50,000 servers in 70 countries, there is a tendency to change them one at a time, and that’s going to take you two years, unless it takes you longer. Also initially the HD services were file downloads, and now they are streaming services.
But if content delivery networks are not trendy and are not easy to write about, they enable services which are. Akamai is the power behind those billions of tracks or apps (take your pick) which have been downloaded to Apple devices, and it is also behind many of the HD video smooth streaming deliveries of both Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight video services.
It’s a simple claim ‘ Akamai is the only CDN which supports live and on-demand HD streaming, and while we don’t believe that, we DO believe that Akamai now and in the future will deliver MORE high quality HD video streams across the internet than anyone else.
The new Akamai HD Network offers adaptive bitrate streaming which seamlessly adjusts to fluctuations in available bandwidth and offers sub-second startup times and legal player Authentication.
This all comes at a time when online audiences are growing to broadcast scale and when then are naturally demanding higher quality content.
In October last year we reported that Microsoft had turned to Akamai to help it show off Microsoft Silverlight to best advantage against Adobe Flash, using what was the new Adaptive Edge service of Akamai to offer streaming video as well as dropping the Move Networks streaming technology into its IIS servers. All this was beta, so we suppose now that it is mainstream and widely available.
At the time we suspected that this ‘Adaptive Edge’ network which Akamai talked about was not much more than one step up from what it was calling Large File Download Optimization technology in 2007, which ships pieces of files around its own internal network, rather like BitTorrent, taking the most popular parts of HD video files to the network edge, from where they can be either downloaded or streamed.
Microsoft last year made an investment in Move Networks and is a partner of Move, and its own IIS system now ships out video in two second chunks so that it can vary the resolution based on network conditions, and best use the Akamai CDN cache.
By having 50,000 servers, in 1000 different locations across 70 countries, Akamai reckons that its servers are ‘local’ to any customer that wants to stream a genuine HD video file. By Local it means a few hundred miles away, rather than the few 1,000 miles away where most of its rival sit.