Reducing infrastructure costs without sacrificing application performance is more important for media and streaming companies than ever before… and this is what everyone was talking about at NAB April 5-9. Believe it or not, this was actually equal to the AI buzz! While running demos and talking to customers at Akamai’s lounge each day, I spoke to a wide range of technical folks and got to hear what’s top-of-mind for developers and application owners in the broadcasting, entertainment, and media industries.
1. Three Letters: V-P-U
Akamai Cloud recently launched Accelerated Compute, making NETINT VPUs available in the cloud for the first time ever. NETINT’s hardware is specifically designed to achieve higher streaming density and media transcoding performance while consuming less power than your typical CPU and GPU setups. This helps you reduce the resources and costs needed to deploy critical services like real-time preparation for more customized services.
Accelerated compute makes VPUs accessible via the cloud, allowing developers, especially those unfamiliar with application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), to try them for the first time. It also enables applications already using VPUs on-prem to scale and implement failover strategies in the cloud. During the NAB Streaming Summit, Alexander Leschinsky, CEO & Co-Founder of G&L Systemhaus, joined Akamai’s VP of Cloud Product Management Shawn Michels to talk about their new hybrid cloud architecture featuring Accelerated Compute, LKE, and their on-prem tech stack. Watch the recorded session to learn more about Accelerated instances.
2. AI Is and Will Continue to Be Critical for Improving Viewer Experience
OTT providers are navigating a data deluge that will only keep growing. From content catalogues to user ratings to viewing history and system-level transactions between OTT systems, like networking configurations and payment processing, data underpins the entire media workflow. Ratings and viewing history data are essential to surfacing new content that engages users, and data on token use per account helps identify piracy. The ever-present challenge is ingesting, processing, and taking immediate action on that data, especially given the volume.
To meet that challenge, OTT providers can strategically deploy artificial intelligence (AI) across the entire media workflow to increase the speed and breadth of insights and services this data can provide. User Interfaces are a smart starting point for AI services like natural language processing (NLP) and recommendation engines, which can encourage discovery and engagement. During NAB, we even showed an example of this with our partner Fermyon.
OTT providers can also apply AI to existing content libraries. AI and optimized metadata usage allows a user to search “movie with an epic car chase” instead of needing to know the exact title or lead actors. We demo’d a solution with FPT to show this in action, using a library of MLB games and actions like “show home runs from [player name]”.
AI can also play a role in everything from log analysis to piracy detection. This is an area to watch for new tools and expanded functionality in your current tech stack.
3. Observability Should Be a Priority
You can build the most innovative media application on the market, but without clear visibility into its performance and potential points of failure, growing and retaining subscribers becomes significantly harder.
Media streaming, digital storefronts, online games, and the endless web applications that power our lives rely on edge networks just as much as on cloud services. Distributed architectures, like CDNs, are more complex to monitor and operate. Many instances handle large amounts of traffic and generate massive amounts of log data, and most solutions designed to deliver operational insights on that much data are prohibitively expensive. As a result, operations teams don’t have the critical visibility they need to operate most of their infrastructure efficiently and reliably.
Your observability solution doesn’t need to be expensive or all-knowing, but it does need to deliver essential, neatly compiled information. Our partner, Hydrolix, built TrafficPeak to specifically address this issue, specifically targeting log volumes and other information essential for distributed application architecture. Distributed networks are a critical part of the application stack. We need tools that reflect that.
4. Egress Will Drain Your IT Budget (If You Let It)
Anyone who deploys media workloads in the cloud understands how egress makes cloud bills skyrocket; it’s not the actual infrastructure. As content libraries continue to expand, they create an increasingly long tail of assets that even CDN caching can’t prevent from accruing egress costs. At the same time, high-resolution streams are becoming the norm, increasing the pressure to lower egress costs that strain developers’ time and bandwidth and pull them away from work on new features and innovation.
Re-architecting is a tough pill to swallow, but for teams facing steep egress feed from their cloud provider, it might be necessary to move away from providers that price gouge egress. Akamai Cloud now offers the lowest egress cost on the market at $0.005 (half a penny!) per GB. Check out our other media-specific platform benefits.
5. Distributed, Portable Architectures Will Optimize Media Workflows
This point builds on point #4, but it deserves its own spotlight. Portability and the ability to distribute across cloud providers are essential to reducing costs, preventing outages, and avoiding overreliance on a single provider.
Streaming media over the internet differs from other web-based applications because it involves transferring large amounts of data and is sensitive to latency. We started streaming nearly 30 years ago, so we recognize that distributing our libraries is essential to addressing scale and speed challenges. In fact, it was this realization that led to the creation of content delivery networks (CDNs), with Akamai being the pioneer. Akamai is actively building out the regions, connectivity, and ecosystem necessary to support this vision, allowing customers to enhance user experience efficiently and cost-effectively.
Try Akamai Cloud’s media solutions by signing up for a free account, or get in touch with our cloud computing consultants to chat about custom solutions. Learn more about the evolution to the edge here.
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