The Canopy-Hilton hotel in Madrid hosted the Media Cloud Tech Day, an event in which representatives of prominent companies in the broadcast field were able to discover the vision of the future cloud from Akamai, which involves a global strategy with flexibility and versatility as its flag.
A distributed cloud that takes advantage of an approach edge to overcome the main challenges of streaming with the ultimate goal of offering the best possible experience to users: this is the Akamai vision for the present and future of on-demand and live video, a reality that is already beginning to offer advantages to leading players in the field broadcast and half.
John Bradshawarea director cloud computing technology and strategyand Ilker Urgenc, senior media technical solutions engineer, have introduced Akamai’s vision for this approach, supporting the Akamai Connected Cloud and Media, a set of cloud-based services that accommodate a wide variety of use cases. Among them are the video transcoding, packaging, processing or storagealways with the flexibility to test and deploy any technology, whether proprietary, QCP or open source.
The event, introduced by Fede Vadillo, senior solutions engineer from Akamai, has been completed with the vision of AI applied to streaming presented by Manuel Cardeñas and Nacho MileoCEO and head of product, respectively, from Cires21.
Gecko: door of the edge in the Akamai cloud
Bradshaw has introduced his presentation anticipating a change of model in the field of experience cloud. From rigid architectures with unpredictable costs derived from product transportation or competition, the development of technology and the proliferation of regions aims to take advantage of capabilities edge to offer a distributed computing. In this regard, the head of Akamai has introduced Gecko (Generalized Edge Compute), an initiative that allows us to address the challenging cloud context through a platform of cloud computing enterprise technology aimed at delivering “better experiences” by running workloads closer to the users, devices and data sources.
The Gecko expansion is part of a “multiphase initiative” from Akamai that aims to bring this system to the maximum possible locations. In a first phase, this proposal will support Virtual machines in a maximum of 100 regions, an amount that will be multiplied to house containers and, in the near future, the automated workload orchestration. The expansion of Akamai’s Gecko strategy will especially help those operations that require a ultra-low latency, resilient and redundantconcepts that inevitably evoke broadcast environments, and more specifically the streaming live. Among the benefits of this approach outlined by Bradshaw, are massive distributions with more precision and elasticity to a broader market, cost optimization or the ability to execute more demanding computing processes.
Cloud computing in the world of OTT
Ilker Urgenc, senior media technical solutions engineerhas taken over from Bradshaw to break down multiple use cases in which Connected Cloud for Mediathe open and distributed infrastructure of Akamai, can bring important benefits to OTT providers. Among them, a significant cost reduction, simple billing, technical flexibility or more geographic options.
Urgenc has described this environment through challenges that range from optimizing the user experiencewho expect instant access to content by removing the bufferinguntil internal processes in all phases of the distribution chain as the growing needs of storage, unpredictable traffic peaks, security or the wide variety of formats, bitrates or options packaging depending on the different markets. In each of these cases, Akamai’s open, standards-based infrastructure with multi-CDN and multi-cloud support forms an “ecosystem” that helps overcome challenges in a wide variety of use cases.
He senior media technical solutions engineer Akamai has also dedicated a large part of his speech to explaining the benefits of CMCD (Common Media Client Data)an information exchange system that unites the world of players and the content delivery composed of a defined set of structured key/value pairs that is currently used by agents such as Vimeo, Paramount Pictures, Fox, Disney or Warner Bros. Discovery. Likewise, Urgenc has presented to the industry a more recent development that aims to facilitate this intercommunication of information, but between originsCDNs and players: CMSD (Common Media Server Data). The solution collects information on parameters such as SessionID, time to first byte, target latency either encoded bitrate to gain deeper insights into OTT processes and apply it to use cases such as defining network performance limits to alleviate congestion spikes or dynamic timeout thresholds. Additionally, the Akamai event has served to present some keys to TrafficPeaka solution Hydrolix for Akamai Connected Cloud that allows you to identify large amounts of data to identify, discover and mitigate problems in real time.
AI applied to video streaming solutions
Akamai’s Media Cloud Tech Day has ended on a local note Cires21a Spanish company that has presented how AI can enrich VOD content broadcast live, improve monetization, enhance the engagement, respond to accessibility requirements and promote cost reduction. Specifically, Manuel CardeñasCEO, has been in charge of introducing IntelAItechnology available via API that is supported by processes speech-to-text and video-to-text To generate embeddings that allow multiplying the information extracted from all types of assets based on models open source.
Relying on a demo conducted by Nacho Mileo, head of productattendees have been able to discover different applications that take advantage of this technology also available via API. For example, C21 Live Captions Allows you to perform translations and subtitling in real time taking a stream HLS in this case coming from Akamai, with a latency invisible to the viewer and easily manageable through a control panel, but the Cires21 toolset offers multiple applications that demonstrate how the era of AI applied to live streaming It has only just begun: content summaries, highlights, clip creation, adaptation to social media formats, intro detection, scene contextualization, EPG corrections either sentiment analysis.
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