Akamai, Microsoft Team on Adaptive Streaming Service

Content delivery network giant Akamai Technologies Inc. (AKAM) today announced plans for a new managed service for online businesses, based on new Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) software that adapts to connection speeds to provide users a higher quality streaming video experience on their PCs.

Microsoft is introducing new Web server technology, called Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS7.0) Smooth Streaming, that it claims gives consumers instant startup times and no buffering by adapting the quality of the video stream in real time based upon changing connectivity speed.

This, the software giant contends, enables companies to boost brand awareness and advertising revenue by extending average viewing times. They also can benefit from network scalability using distributed HTTP-based Web servers.

Akamai will be building upon this technology with the new service, Akamai AdaptiveEdge Streaming for Microsoft Silverlight, which will be deployed across the company's globally distributed network for use by media companies worldwide.

The service is expected to be available to select Akamai customers in a beta release in early 2009. Akamai AdaptiveEdge Streaming for Silverlight will harness IIS Smooth Streaming, which offers what the CDN says is a simple-to-manage approach for adaptive streaming.

Akamai's global network of tens of thousands of distributed servers provides scale, reliability, insight and performance for online businesses.

"Smooth Streaming is an evolution of proven Silverlight technology that has powered global online events," said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Division at Microsoft, in prepared comments. "Our objective has always been to provide a platform that enables next-generation media experiences on the Web. Together with Akamai, we will take that a step further by offering a consistently superior adaptive streaming experience on a global scale."

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