Akamai Expands Control Over Media Platforms with New Video Workflow Capabilities

As a distributed cloud service provider, Akamai solves the long-standing problems of today's centralized cloud model in terms of control, competitive pressures and costs.

October 15, 2024 – Akamai Technologies, Inc. (Akamai), the cloud service provider responsible for supporting and protecting online life, recently launched new video workflow capabilities at the International Broadcast Conference (IBC2024) in the Netherlands, providing media companies with better choice and greater control at every step of the video delivery chain . These new capabilities integrate Akamai's cloud services and delivery platform with the company's growing partner network to provide customers with excellent flexibility to tailor media experiences to meet their needs.

“Streaming services, broadcast networks and online video platforms are looking for greater control over their workflows. They don’t want to be locked into a single vendor, incur additional overhead for delivering content, or indirectly subsidize competing services,” said Jon Alexander, vice president of product management at Akamai. “We are providing them with an open platform that lets them choose the components of their workflow and run them when and where they see fit.”

In a 2024 Akamai-commissioned Forrester Consulting survey of individual contributors and leaders responsible for building/maintaining end-user applications, three-quarters of respondents said that it was extremely important to flexibly deploy computing resources closer to end users while still maintaining centralized management and control. At the same time, a 2023 survey of media and entertainment companies found that due to cost pressures, 73% of respondents were considering abandoning large traditional cloud providers in favor of cloud-native service providers that offer better data portability.

By opening its distributed cloud platform to a wide range of applications and platforms in the media workflow ecosystem, Akamai enables customers to control every aspect of their workflow and use a vibrant and growing network of third-party partners. Supporting multi-cloud architectures eliminates vendor lock-in, allowing customers to leverage the most appropriate products and services based on their needs and flexibly adjust their use of cloud services as their business grows. Akamai's large-scale, distributed, interconnected cloud platform gives it the unique ability to minimize egress charges and provide generous traffic allowances, providing excellent price-performance across the entire network from core to edge.

Media companies can choose from a wide range of software and partner options to transport, prepare, process, deliver, protect and monetize digital content at every step of their workflow. Akamai's media services are trusted by the top 10 video streaming services and include solutions for content contribution, transport, transcoding, packaging, digital rights management, ad insertion and content security.

Earlier this year, Akamai added media-optimized NVIDIA GPUs to its portfolio of cloud solutions. The new GPUs and workflow capabilities further advance Akamai’s efforts to provide media and entertainment companies with more cost-effective and efficient ways to build scalable and resilient architectures and deploy workloads faster, more reliably, and more portable, while taking advantage of the most globally distributed cloud platform and integrated content delivery and security services.