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Akamai provides HD content online |
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Written by CB Team
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Friday, 31 August 2007 |
 Akamai Technologies - service provider for accelerating content and applications online - has announced that a consistent, high-definition video experience is now possible online via its global content distribution network.
Akamai’s customers are now delivering HD quality content on Akamai’s uniquely distributed edge delivery network that is specifically tuned for optimal delivery of HD files online.
To realize this same vision and fidelity in the online world, a 2-hour feature-length movie would need to be encoded at a bit rate of at least 6-8 Mbps, which would result in the file being a size of 5-8 GB.
This presents numerous technical challenges to deliver such a high-quality, large file. For instance, delivering a file encoded at 6 Mbps to an audience of one Nielsen ratings point (1,102,000 households) would require 6.6 Terabits of sustained bandwidth, and that doesn’t even take into account latency and network congestion.
In addition, many large HD videos are not always watched in their entirety. It is therefore optimal to locally cache only the portion of a file that is most requested by end users, which on average is the beginning of the file or movie. This partial caching of HD video enables both popular and less popular, long-tail content to be served from the edge to guarantee optimal performance.
"Akamai's goal is to be able to support 100 Terabits per second of traffic. Our flexible and distributed architecture uniquely positions us to realize that vision and we are aggressively progressing toward that goal," said Afergan. "We are also committed to the long-term objective of building an ecosystem linking content owners, network providers and video platform players to ensure a superior HD web experience wherever last-mile infrastructure permits."
Akamai
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Last Updated ( Friday, 31 August 2007 )
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