Given the successful growth in business from compute and cybersecurity, few have questioned why in the past 9 years Akamai has not sought to subsidize its shrinking traditional CDN business by acquiring further out into the video value chain – encoding, video player, QoE analytics etc. Excluding Akamai’s hoovering up of CDN customer contracts from Lumen and StackPath, the last notable deal was the acquisition of UDP specialist Octoshape in 2015, bringing networking optimization tools to the table. 2012 was a bumper year for Akamai, when it spent well over $300 million on acquisitions including web acceleration specialist Fastsoft for $14 million, automated cloud front-end Blaze for $19 million, and high-end CDN provider Cotendo for $278 million. Akamai then capped…