Media Services Live
Simplify live event workflows while scaling with growing audiences.
Television has been steadily losing ground for online content
Television has been steadily losing ground for online content, and that dynamic finally reached live broadcasts.
The growing number of streaming video users represents a huge increase in transfer sizes - especially when it comes to high resolution content - implicating a huge financial effort in infrastructure and their maintenance.
Find out how you can ensure an adequate transmission for any device, with no interruptions.
Having partners like Akamai that can scale and stand up with us is critical to our success.
— Eric Black, VP, Technologies, NBC Sports Group
Benefits To Your Business
- Provides worry-free high quality streaming to reach your audience through scalable and reliable live content ingestion.
- Simplifies content workflow operations by centralizing live event processing and delivery into a single cloud platform.
- Reduces CAPEX/OPEX by eliminating the need to purchase and scale on-premise content origins.
- Increases availability by leveraging Akamai’s globally distributed ingest points
Media Services Live
Today’s viewers are no longer staying home or sitting on their couch to watch a large scale live event on their television. From the US Presidential Inauguration to the FIFA World Cup, every major live event is seeing an increase in online viewership.
In order to keep up with this trend, content producers are faced with tremendous operational issues such as establishing a streaming origin, providing multiple bitrate streams and re-packaging content for the massive device landscape they need to reach. Not to mention managing items such as streaming quality and content security.
Akamai has delivered the world’s largest and most viewed live events for nearly 15 years. Leveraging this experience, Akamai’s Media Services Live solution helps simplify the live streaming experience for content producers without sacrificing streaming quality, format coverage or content security. Media Services Live enables producers to leverage the power of the Akamai Intelligent Platform™, eliminates the need for a content origin and simplifies live workflows.
How it Works
Media Services Live is comprised of a set of standard functionality with additional options that can be added to suit a more customized workflow.
The standard functionality includes access to Akamai’s globally distributed and dedicated content ingest points. This is the best option for content producers who wish to provide Akamai with pre-packaged or pre-encrypted content.
Today, Akamai can ingest live MPEG-DASH, RTMP, Microsoft Smooth, HDS or HLS. Content producers leverage the power of the Akamai Intelligent Platform™ without having to adapt the content or manifest. Optional components for Media Services Live include Stream Packaging for dynamically packaging RTMP content for either HLS or HDS delivery, Smooth Streaming Enablement and Media Encryption for content security.
Why Media Services Live?
It Reduces Complexity
Live events can be a pile of complexities. But nowhere is this more apparent than in content origin and encoder operations. Establishing a content origin can be a lengthy and resource intensive undertaking. Enough servers must be purchased, configured, and maintained for maximum capacity, even if most of that capacity will go largely unused during normal day-to-day operations. Physical space, Internet connectivity, and power must be rented and the entire operation must be monitored constantly. Add to that the complexity of managing multiple encoders outputting multiple formats and operations quickly become unmanageable without an army of highly trained resources. Akamai’s Media Services Live eliminates the need to establish a content origin for a live event - since content can be directly ingested into the Akamai network. This means a reduction in operational complexity and costs for every single live event. Additionally, by leveraging the Stream Packaging option, content producers can simplify their encoder operations by only needing to provide Akamai with an RTMP stream at the desired bitrates and Akamai will package the content into either HLS or HDS. This can reduce the encoder requirements and complexity by up to 50%.
It Offers Worldwide Coverage
One of the first steps in a high quality live streaming workflow is the entry points into the content delivery network. In order to ensure a high quality connection at all times Akamai has strategically placed dedicated ingestion points across the globe for true worldwide coverage. These geographically dispersed ingest points mean a closer and higher quality connection between encoders and the Akamai network, which in turn means a higher quality live streaming experience. And, in the rare event of a failed or under performing entry point Akamai dynamically remaps to the next best available ingestion point to ensure a seamless experience to the content viewer.
It Simplifies Device Reach
Some of the most recent research shows truly massive device growth. This means that reaching this ever expanding device landscape is going to get even more difficult. Akamai’s Stream Packaging option simplifies the problems associated with reaching a varied device environment. Content producers simply provide Akamai with a single or multiple RTMP streams and Akamai will dynamically package the content into either HDS or HLS. This makes reaching the newest devices with the highest quality easier than ever before.
It Offers Security When Needed
As more and more content is consumedonline it is constantly being put in a place where it can be pirated or stolen.Live events are particularly susceptible to these types of activities. Thismeans that keeping content secure can oftentimes be just important asgetting the content to the user in the first place. Akamai enables producersto encrypt their content as part of the Stream Packaging process to ensuretheir content is protected at every point during the event.
