Entertainment and Media

Akamai must formulate a viable strategy to succeed in an industry that is volatile with thin margins. The company has a commoditized service offering and deals with customers that compete against it. It is challenged both by cloud providers that have more scale and ways to make money, and by competitors that have distinct CapEx advantages. Akamai i...

Although CDNs play a vital role in how the Web works, the volume, variety, and velocity of the log files that CDNs generate can cause issue detection and mitigation to become exceedingly difficult. To overcome this data challenge, it is necessary to first have an understanding of normal CDN patterns before identifying activities that deviate from t...

This market insight on the global tablet devices market discusses the possible reasons for the steep decline in tablet shipments and also suggests what can be done to arrest this fall. It provides market definitions, unit shipment forecasts, segmentation by region, and market share analysis of the key competitors in the market. The competitive envi...

Over a period of roughly 3 years, Apple has taken a large percentage of its content delivery to its in-house CDN. It is using its own CDN for iTunes, iOS and OS X updates, music streaming, and a host of other assorted Apple content. Part of Apple’s reasoning for building its own CDN was because of performance issues with iCloud. In addition, Appl...

As major content owners/distributors continue to bring more of their content delivery in-house, third-party CDN providers are being affected. In the case of Akamai, the key reason for the slowdown in traffic and revenue growth was a result of Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook moving a larger percentage of their traffic to their in-house delivery netwo...

Digital Rights Management (DRM) and Encrypted HLS are the most commonly used content protection technologies today. Both approaches have a strong track record in terms of securing proprietary content. However, content owners/providers that are focused on streaming media are  more likely to be interested in Encrypted HLS as it is simpler and less e...

Traditionally, server-side ad insertion has been aimed at tackling the problems of ad blocking and device fragmentation. Advances in technology are now emphasising the importance of ad stitching for live and catch up TV. Client-side ad SDKs have grown in sophistication while the platforms they run have become more capable, and the transition to nat...

Comcast launched its own commercial CDN offering in 2015 and added a new live linear streaming service that it announced at IBC 2015. The new platform provides customers the ability to easily turn-up, manage, and enable ad or subscription-supported live, over-the-top, full-time channel experiences. While a lot of vendors in the market offer platfor...

Over-the-top (OTT) video services is considered a complementary entertainment option and is already widespread in Latin America; however, this industry still has growth opportunities, driven by the desire for a cheap service that is available anytime, anywhere, and on any device such as notebooks, tablets, smartphones, smart TVs, and gaming console...