Akamai Introduces liveOrigin

Categories

Akamai announced this week that new capabilities will be added to its linear video streaming delivery system, Media Services Live, designed to bridge the gap between broadcast television and 24×7 livestreaming. The new purpose-built capabilities, collectively referred to as liveOrigin, will offer broadcast-quality ingestion, decrease latency, and create redundancies to ensure always-on availability for OTT providers.

Akamai’s new capabilities are meant to address complications that have arisen as consumers shift from viewing live events on television to viewing them on the Internet. During this shift, many OTT providers have struggled to meet the demands of viewers who expect video that matches or exceeds broadcast television quality. The benchmark is a difficult one to hit, in large part due to the unpredictable and changing nature of network conditions and the difficulties associated with securely ingesting and delivering content.

Akamai’s liveOrigin capabilities are intended to solve this problem through significant improvements to linear livestreaming quality. To implement broadcast-quality ingest, liveOrigin leverages Akamai’s Media Acceleration technology to support throughput of higher bit rates and mitigate poor connectivity. In addition, Akamai’s mapping technology automatically routes content for uninterrupted viewing during lost connections. End users will also have the benefit of DVR and archive functionality for alternate viewing options and live rewind.

Low latency, end-to-end TLS support, and a self-healing network will complement the improved ingest. LiveOrigin reduces the standard linear livestreaming latency from 30 seconds to 10 for HTTP-based streaming in HLS/HDS/DASH. Added redundancies replicate content and automatically reroute it to other entry points for immediate failover in the event of congestion, DDoS attacks, or poor performance. LiveOrigin also introduces the ability to receive encoded content from TLS sessions to maintain secure transport between components and to end users. To monitor these performance benefits, customers can access real-time first-mile reporting of stream-level metrics including average ingested bitrate, latency, packet loss, and errors.

LiveOrigin capabilities are immediately available via Akamai’s Media Services Live, following their debut at this week’s 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas.

Scroll to Top