During the current World Cup in Brazil, cloud services provider Akamai has been supporting high quality video streaming, site performance and in some cases security services to 50 rights holders which have been delivering live and on-demand video across the world.
Before the tournament Alex Gibbons, vice President UK and Ireland at Akamai, commented: “This will be the first Digital World Cup and it’s set to smash the first Digital Olympics of 2012. It will attract a global audience of billions on 400 per cent plus more connected devices utilising a 300 per cent increase in global connection speeds, and ever higher bit rates supplied by our 50-plus broadcasters. What this means is that this is an absolute monster of a challenge.”
In the first 16 days of the World Cup Akamai had already delivered more traffic than during the Sochi Olympics and London 2012. Akamai’s World Cup portal gives traffic figures for each match, with the 26 June Portugal vs Ghana, and USA vs Germany matches attracting the highest traffic peaks so far, at 6.85Tbps.
Before the tournament began, Gibbons spoke of the challenges the company faced: “Video must be of the highest possible quality and websites and apps must scale and be ultra-responsive. Wifi, 3G, and 4G connections must all provide an optimised experience and to top it all video, sites, apps and data centres must be protected by bullet proof security. Everything is a potential attack surface. Brand protection, revenue protection, rights protection, data protection it doesn’t get bigger or harder than this and we love meeting these challenges with our customers.”
Akamai’s cloud-based digital media, site performance and security solutions are designed to make the online experience faster, scalable and more secure. The company is seeing daily average peak traffic across its Intelligent Platform exceeding 20Tbps, and a potential concurrent stream volume of more than 2m.
