Perform Ramps-Up With Live Online Flash Streaming Of Sports Events With Akamai

Akamai Technologies Limited, a subsidiary of Akamai Technologies Inc, a leading provider of rich media, dynamic transactions and enterprise applications online, has announced that Perform (www.performgroup.com), formerly known as Premium TV, is leveraging Akamai's global media delivery network to stream live coverage of major sporting events in the Adobe Flash FLV format.
Akamai's Flash video format is unique in its ability to minimize latency and offer almost real-time coverage of popular sporting events.
Since using the Adobe Flash FLV video format, Perform has experienced peak hits of 775,843 for key events and peak traffic flow of 700 Mbits per second across Akamai's platform. With a worldwide audience of over 15 million viewers, Perform delivers in excess of 10,000 live events and 35,000 edited clips per year for more than 200 web, broadband TV and mobile services. In order to deliver these services in real-time to its expanding user base, the company realised that it needed to improve the quality of the delivery and speed of its live performance video streaming.
Howard Kitto, CIO of Perform, said: "Many of our customers want real-time live online access to racing and sporting events. We realised that a more robust solution was needed that could deliver the quality and live streaming our customers were looking for. This is especially important for new regional coverage such as Asian football and the Australian Open where normal Internet latency issues would have had a major impact on performance for our viewers in Europe and America."
Because of the real-time of sporting events, Perform realised it could have a competitive advantage by minimizing the latency between the live event and the time before the end-user views the stream on his/her PC. Perform embraced the Adobe Flash FLV video format which has the ability to significantly reduce latency and deliver live streams faster than any other format.
As an existing Akamai customer, Perform was already using the Akamai Media Delivery solution to stream events on its website and so they decided to look at delivering live events in Flash Akamai's platform. Akamai Media Delivery also allows Perform to manage various rights restrictions to ensure only viewers in authorised regions can access footage so as not to infringe copyright.
Alex Gibbons, Director of Digital Media EMEA at Akamai, said: "Perform is a leader is providing online video services. In today's business environment, having state-of-the-art technology delivery, digital rights management and real-time streaming is critical to commercial success and failure; our solutions are geared to provide businesses with the tools to succeed. Our solutions enable the world's leading media and entertainment organisations to provide their customers with the content they want using the Internet as the delivery and management platform, saving costs and expanding their revenues and growth potential."
Further information is available at: www.performgroup.com and www.akamai.com.
(KMcA/JM)