Akamai’s new Media Cloud is aimed firmly at competing with AWS Elemental, using a ‘partners first’ approach that provides services from many different vendors (its Qualified Compute Partners include Yospace, EZDRM, Unified Streaming and Scalstrm), so users have a choice. 

Jon Alexander, VP Product, Akamai Technologies, said: “It gives customers an alternative to Amazon. We’ve assembled multiple different solutions that, in aggregate, can do anything AWS is doing. We’re trying to make sure we have that open platform, to offer choice. We’re not competing with our customers.” 

Qv7X54eM

Alexander: ‘We’re not competing with our customers’ 

He emphasised flexibility, as Akamai already has users running some pieces of their operations on AWS and some on Akamai. The Media Cloud offers a full video workflow: transport, encoding, transcoding, packaging, DRM and ad insertion, with multiple partners for each of these, such as Ateme, Bitmovin, Capella, and MediaExcel for encoding. 

Akamai has also joined the Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA) as a Principal Member, following the formal merger of DASH Industry Forum (which it helped found) and the SVTA. 

Stand Number  13.D301 

Company   Akamai Technologies