Akamai Technologies arrived at IBC 2016 fresh off a historic effort at Rio 2016, where NBC Olympics leveraged the company's content-delivery network (CDN) and technology to support a monumental streaming operation, which comprises 3.3 billion total streaming minutes, 2.71 billion of them live. Also, 100 million unique users tuned in to NBC Olympics' digital coverage over the course of the Games.
John Bishop at the Akamai booth at IBC 2016
At the show, Akamai showcased a variety of its offerings, including Ingest Acceleration, Dynamic Encode to Entry-point Mapping (DEEM), Media Acceleration (including a demo of sub-10-second low-latency 4K-video delivery over the public internet), Ingest Monitoring and Reporting capabilities, and the production model for its Broadcast Operations Control Center (BOCC), which launched earlier this year.
SVG sat down with John Bishop, CTO, media, to discuss Akamai's effort with NBC Olympics in Rio, how the BOCC operation is progressing, the state of live streaming in 4K and VR, and how he sees video-streaming data-rate capabilities increasing in the year ahead.
Akamai Technologies arrived at IBC 2016 fresh off a historic effort at Rio 2016, where NBC Olympics leveraged the company's content-delivery network and technology to support a monumental streaming operation, which comprises 3.3 billion total streaming minutes, 2.71 billion of them live. Also, 100 million unique users tuned in to NBC Olympics' digital coverage over the course of the Games.
At the show, Akamai showcased a variety of its offerings, including Ingest Acceleration, Dynamic Encode to Entry-point Mapping (DEEM), Media Acceleration (including a demo of sub-10-second low-latency 4K-video delivery over the public internet), Ingest Monitoring and Reporting capabilities, and the production model for its Broadcast Operations Control Center (BOCC), which launched earlier this year.
SVG sat down with John Bishop, CTO, media, to discuss Akamai's effort with NBC Olympics in Rio, how the BOCC operation is progressing, the state of live streaming in 4K and VR, and how he sees video-streaming data-rate capabilities increasing in the year ahead.
What insights did Akamai gain from the Rio Olympics experience in terms of overall Internet traffic, and how do you see streaming evolving for future live coverage of high-profile sports events?
The hard thing about seminal tent-pole events like the Euros or Rio is that the internet still goes on with the same amount of traffic. One of the most amazing things about Rio is that the traffic numbers were huge but the internet didn't hiccup. Our BOCC monitored the whole thing, and, from the moment the Opening Ceremony started, the audience size compared to London or Sochi began to increase by orders of magnitude in terms of velocity, overall traffic, higher data rates. The connected devices and set-top boxes numbers were through the roof. At that point, you knew that this was going to be a historically big streaming event.
The Opening Ceremony set the stage for the peaks ahead: Bolt, Phelps, Ledecky, women's gymnastics. But those events were like big cardiogram spikes. Yes, we definitely saw a surge in audience, but it wasn't 0 to 100 [mph]; it was more like 60 to 85. But we already did that 0-60 sprint, and the audiences remained spread across all these events, including at times 70 concurrent events.
From a U.S. perspective, it was unclear how this event was going to play out, because the Rio time zone was so similar to the East Coast. In many ways, you're competing against television, because [fans] can go to [their] cable service and watch those same events at the same time. But one of the most interesting things was, we didn't see the [streaming] audience dipping significantly during primetime. People just kept on chugging right through.
One of the biggest surprise for me during the big [viewership blips] for big events midday and midweek days were how many people were using connected devices. We absolutely expected [viewership increases] on tablets and computers, but we saw a massive amount of people watching through Apple TV and Roku. Of course, we had more connected devices [streaming] in the evening, but it was a nice surprise to see connected devices stay strong during the day.
At NAB 2016, Akamai launched its BOCC. Can you provide an update on how it is progressing?
Over the last 15 years, the one goal that we've had for internet video is for the experience to be television-like. But, today, we're not trying to be broadcast-like anymore; we're trying to be broadcast-equal or better than broadcast. I think, in many ways, we've gotten there. I think Rio and the Euro Cup and some [other] things we've done show that we've passed broadcast in terms of fidelity. We're doing higher resolutions; we're doing things like 4K and VR and 360 - things that are impossible to very difficult to find over traditional TV services.
We are nearing [broadcast level] in terms of concurrency, but one area we are really trying put that same level of rigor into is hygiene and telemetry [of the live stream]. Broadcast systems have a broadcast-operations center with detailed telemetry and instrumentation. If we are really trying to replace television, we need to have that same level of hygiene and make sure that every system component is being watched in terms of health, load, and compliancy. We need to be looking at every part of the supply chain. We want to be able to say we have the same level of rigor in OTT that we do in broadcast.
How is Akamai working to decrease the latency seen in live-streamed sports events versus linear television?
On an average [live production], you're probably 45 seconds behind live. And nothing annoys me more than when I get an alert on my phone that someb
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Akamai Technologies arrived at IBC 2016 fresh off a historic effort at Rio 2016, where NBC Olympics leveraged the company's content-delivery network (CDN) and technology to support a monumental streaming operation, which comprises 3.3 billion total streaming minutes, 2.71 billion of them live. Also, 100 million unique users tuned in to NBC Olympics' digital coverage over the course of the Games. 
