Mitesh Jain, Country Manager, Akamai Technologies, shares with us how Akamai’s CDN technology is helping in addressing the issues of streaming and ensure a flawless viewing experience for sports fans
Some edited excerpts:
What milestone has Akamai’s network in India recently achieved in terms of peak throughput? How does this demonstrate Akamai’s leadership in the network’s capabilities in content delivery?
Akamai’s scale and capacity are essential to delivering high-traffic events. Akamai’s history and experience in delivering the biggest and highest-profile events provide us to prepare our platform for our customers using a consistent, repeatable, and proven approach. The games in Tokyo and Rio can be a case in point, where Akamai streamed 500 million hours and 234 million hours of video respectively for customers. This included managing the average peak traffic for the full event in both Tokyo (8.3 Tbps) and Rio (3 Tbps). In India, during the recent Indian cricket tournament, Akamai’s network had a consistent throughput of 18.5 Tbps, the highest ever for Akamai India’s network, topping last year’s 16 Tbps. It also managed and secured the APIs for the broadcast event, recording a peak concurrency of API delivery of 32 million, which is higher than the previous record of 25.3 million. This was made possible because of Akamai’s massively distributed edge network, made up of thousands of servers strategically placed in data centers around the world.
With such a large network, Akamai can bring content closer to end users, lowering latency and ensuring speedier delivery. Also, known for its robust security measures, it offers a range of security services designed to protect websites, applications, and digital assets from various cyber threats, including distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, web application attacks, and data breaches. Akamai’s network can absorb and mitigate large-scale DDoS attacks, ensuring uninterrupted availability of content.
How does Akamai’s CDN technology address the issues of streaming and ensure a flawless viewing experience for sports fans?
Modern viewers have acquired a preference for instant and continuous access to streaming services, and they expect top-tier video quality regardless of the device they use for live streaming.
Earlier this year, Akamai introduced new cloud computing capabilities for streaming video to help OTT operators deliver higher quality and more personalized video experiences to viewers. These capabilities are designed to help OTT services operate complex applications and demanding workloads via Akamai Connected Cloud, a massively distributed edge and cloud platform for cloud computing, content delivery, and security, in order to deliver higher quality and more personalized video experiences to viewers, as well as realize lower, more predictable operational costs and improve efforts to monetize content.
To help OTT operators improve the viewing experience and obtain additional visibility into video performance, Akamai has also enhanced support for the CMCD (Common Media Client Data) specification, which enables device-based media players to send playback information to Akamai and other CDNs. This helps improve video start-up time and reduce buffering.
With CMCD support, OTT operators can also benefit from more consistent, reliable metrics on viewer quality of experience. The CDN receives meaningful client-side data and affords the low-latency, high-volume processing power to generate logs that can be delivered to third-party analytics tools for reporting and analysis.
In addition to a managed CDN, Akamai offers Adaptive Media Delivery, a highly scalable technology to support streaming of live and on-demand content. As a live streaming server, Adaptive Media Delivery has enabled streaming of some of the world’s largest online events, including the FIFA World Cup, the Super Bowl, and the Olympics.
Additionally, Akamai’s updated Access Revocation boasts improved scale to serve larger audience sizes as well as quicker revocation response times, both of which are critical in the case of live sports. It is also core to Akamai’s “prevent-discover-enforce” content security posture, providing content rights owners the power to stop unauthorized video streams. The latest version of Access Revocation was recently used during a major sporting event in Asia, with more than 5 million concurrent viewers, during which Akamai’s Broadcast Operations Control Center identified that approximately 10% of the viewers were unauthorized.
How have the unparalleled CDN services contributed to the success of viewership without any frame loss?
Akamai’s CDN services leverage a global network, intelligent routing, edge caching, scalability, and Quality of Service (QoS) monitoring to ensure successful viewership without frame loss. This comprehensive approach ensures the efficient delivery of video content, resulting in a high-quality and seamless viewing experience for end-users.
Some of the services include:
1. Global content distribution
Akamai has an extensive network of strategically positioned servers worldwide. By distributing content across these servers, Akamai reduces the distance and network hops necessary for data to travel, bringing the content closer to end-users. This proximity results in faster and more efficient delivery of video content, minimizing frame loss and buffering issues.
2. Routing and load balancing
Selecting the most optimal path for content delivery by dynamically analyzing network conditions, traffic patterns, and server performance. Intelligent routing, combined with effective load balancing, ensures that video traffic is evenly distributed across multiple servers, preventing congestion and mitigating frame loss.
3. Utilization of edge caching
This involves storing frequently accessed or popular content closer to end-users on edge servers. This eliminates the need to retrieve content from the origin server for each request, reducing latency and network congestion. By delivering content from nearby edge servers, Akamai minimizes the occurrence of frame loss and ensures a seamless viewing experience.
4. Scalability and capacity of CDN infrastructure
The CDN infrastructure is designed to handle massive concurrent requests and high traffic loads. It can dynamically scale to accommodate surges in viewership demand, such as during live events or popular video releases. As such, the CDN can efficiently manage the influx of video traffic without compromising on frame loss or degrading the quality of the viewing experience.
5. Continuous monitoring of network conditions, performance metrics, and user experience to ensure optimal video delivery
By proactively identifying potential issues, such as network congestion or server load, Akamai takes appropriate measures to mitigate them. Maintaining a high QoS standard enables Akamai to minimize the risk of frame loss and provide viewers with a reliable and uninterrupted viewing experience.
6. Prevent piracy from making an impact
Solutions like Akamai’s Managed Content Protection (MCP) service which is delivered by Akamai experts in the media Broadcast Operations Command Center (BOCC) serve as a first line of defense to monitor, automatically detect, analyze and mitigate piracy threats in real-time to stop them in their tracks.
Additionally, in order to help OTT operators improve their viewing experience and gain additional info on video performance, Akamai has upgraded its support for Common Media Client Data (CMCD) specification. Akamai harnesses CMCD to smartly pre-fetch content that further improves video start-up time and reduces buffer times. This also helps OTT operators get more consistent, reliable metrics on viewer quality of experience. On the other hand, CDN receives crucial client-side data and allows the low-latency, high-volume processing power to generate logs that can be delivered to third-party analytics tools for reporting and analysis.
Can you provide details about the seamless 4K viewing experience that the company has achieved for the first time?
In order to deliver a flawless 4K viewing experience edge caching, content preloading, adaptive bitrate streaming, load balancing, network optimization, and real-time monitoring to deliver a seamless, uninterrupted and high-quality playback of high-resolution content for viewers.
These strategies effectively minimize buffering, decrease latency, maximize bandwidth efficiency, and guarantee uninterrupted and high-quality playback of high-resolution content for viewers.
With 4K content, CDN providers ensure that the video is encoded and delivered in various quality levels, allowing viewers to experience the highest possible resolution without interruptions. The adaptive bitrate streaming technique ensures smooth playback by automatically adjusting the video quality to match the viewer’s network conditions. No matter the type of content — from websites, apps, APIs, video, or software — Akamai’s comprehensive set of content delivery solutions is designed to deliver amazing digital experiences for every user, regardless of location, device, or network.
Building atop Akamai Connected Cloud, the massively distributed edge and cloud platform for cloud computing, content delivery, and security allows developers to harness Akamai cloud computing services to create, run, and secure apps and workloads that are personalized for where and how the viewers connect. This offers viewers a low-latency, high-performing experience, and for OTT operators, this offers global scalability with lower cost and more predictable pricing.
Akamai has a global network capacity of 300+ Tbps and is unparalleled at scale, with over 4,200 locations and upwards of 1,400 networks that span 135 countries. With the largest edge delivery platform, Akamai sees more of what’s happening on the internet.