Akamai launches HD Network that delivers TV-like, HD-quality video online.

http://www.akamai.com/html/misc/hdnetwork.html

by sdave • 17 years ago

26 18 17 years ago

akamai.com

sdave• 17 years ago

Akamai probably now has the largest video distribution capacity on the internet.

hristov• 17 years ago

I am not sure what they mean by "HD" but this is actually slightly worse than the HD clips on youtube.

chaosmachine• 17 years ago

The quality scales up and down randomly mid-clip. It goes to 720p at times, but can't seem to sustain it, and drops back down.

DarkShikari5• 17 years ago

One of the primary causes of this situation is the sheer atrociousness of most commercial video compression solutions.

Here's a little comparison I did a while back:

http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/qual... (full details at http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=102)

Now consider the fact that the majority of websites are still using VP6 or Flash Media Encoder FLV, both of which are significantly worse than Xvid on the chart...

Of course, given that money doesn't grow on trees, many of the top players have switched--Youtube and Facebook are now using x264 almost exclusively, for example.

I would be entirely unsurprised if Akamai ended up being suckered by a company providing inferior solutions. Of course, they don't lose anything by providing worse compression, since their customers pay them for the bandwidth.

SystemOut2• 17 years ago

One of the biggest problems we've run into doing h264 streaming is that there are a huge number of users that don't have powerful enough computers to decode and view h264 in a flash player when it's delivered at 720p. You need a pretty fast system to watch 720p video at even 3 Mbps in the Flash player.

And h264 over HTTP is just a download of the HTTP file starting from a specific marker unless I'm mistaken. Not exactly rocket science. It's HTTP after all...you can't control much of anything on the QOS side. The JW player has the capability to do that out of the box for most of the major CDN networks out there already.

DarkShikari5• 17 years ago

adaptive bitrate streaming

Ah yes, Akamai as always picking features that maximize the money you owe them.

For the vast majority of content (e.g. anything not live), constant bitrate is a terrible idea: it wastes bandwidth in low-action parts of the video and cripples quality in high-action parts of the video. This is why no major non-live video site uses constant bitrate; it's a terrible idea.

Of course, if you want to maximize user quality at all times, you want to maximize utilization of their connection and adapt the bitrate to the bandwidth available. But in reality, bandwidth is expensive, so nobody does this except in live streams.

chrischen2• 17 years ago

When are they going to use P2P streaming download playback? Like bittorrent but for a youtube video? Or do they do that already?

chrischen2• 17 years ago

Found it: they do have bittorrent streaming video - http://www.bitlet.org/

kvogt• 17 years ago

For those not familiar with Akamai's current product lineup, the new features they've introduced here are:

1) HTTP delivery of live flash content (avoids royalty fees normally paid to Adobe for FMS, so ideally Akamai could lower their prices)

2) Improved analytics (current EdgeControl interface is tricky to use for individual videos)

The rest of the features listed are just current features wrapped up into a nice looking press release. In other words... move along, nothing to see here.

jawngee• 17 years ago

The flash demo jerked and jumped around in bandwidth a lot.

The SilverLight demo worked better, but the picture was worse than the Flash version.

BitGravity works wonderfully though. Also, we've been using Panther/CDNetworks without a hitch. They even support HTTP pseudo streaming.

__david__• 17 years ago

> The flash demo jerked and jumped around in bandwidth a lot.

Not only that it was taking 90% of my CPU to display something that did not look even close to 720p in size. And how can they get away with calling that looks more like 360p HD, anyway? I am not impressed.

Skeuomorph• 17 years ago

All the international footprint video delivery networks support 2 mbps streams, and Akamai is not the only one (not even the first) to support the various flavors of adaptive streaming, from Windows Media "MBR" to Silverlight's Smooth Streaming to Apple's adaptive HTTP. Akamai's just the first to take what's been working great on all these networks for months or years and say, "Oh, we could press release this and because we say so, everyone will think it's new and unique!"

It's good to be the incumbent.

Akamai launches HD Network that delivers TV-like, HD-quality video online.

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