CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Dec. 17, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Akamai
Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the leading provider of cloud
services for delivering, optimizing and securing online content and
business applications, and Streaming Media, a diversified news
media company serving and educating the streaming media industry
and community, recently released a report in which online video
professionals in North America and
Europe share insights about how
their organizations leverage content delivery networks (CDNs), as
well as how they consume content both personally and
professionally.
The report, State of CDN Services, found that industry
experts, engineers and executives prefer an array of primary
devices to consume media, tend to work for companies that deliver
either less than 1TB or more than 100TB of online content per
month, and are almost equally concerned with pricing in CDN service
models as with the need to maintain multi-screen delivery to
existing and emerging media consumption devices.
More specifically, the research showed that 67 percent of
respondents prefer to stream their favorite TV shows on-demand as
opposed to watching them live, but 56 percent of viewers prefer to
view live content on the television, as opposed to streaming it
online. When they are streaming content, however, they're doing so
via numerous devices. Laptops account for 25 percent of all
personal on-demand viewing in North
America, followed by desktop computers (22 percent) and TV
(19 percent). Conversely, 23 percent of European viewers prefer
tablets as their primary streaming device followed by desktop
computers (15 percent) and smartphones (10 percent).
"There's never been a more critical inflection point for media
delivery services," says Timothy
Siglin, principal analyst at Transitions, Inc. and
contributing editor for Streaming Media, who was responsible for
creating and analyzing the State of CDN
Services survey. "The market is more fragmented, in
terms of devices, than ever before, presenting an unprecedented
challenge to premium content owners who need to deliver to multiple
screens and device types."
As more and more content consumers are moving toward watching
streaming content online, this presents greater challenges for
content providers. The importance of quality and load time has
never been greater. Nearly one-third of respondents will wait less
than five seconds before abandoning a video. In addition, 92
percent of respondents said that content quality is important or
very important to their overall online viewing experiences.
"More consumers are streaming more video across more devices,
and their expectations for the quality of the content along with
the overall experience continue to rise," said Neil Cohen, vice president, product marketing,
Akamai. "This challenges the full online video ecosystem – from the
technology that content producers and distributors are using to how
and where ads are inserted to business decisions around formats and
capacity planning. To address these challenges, businesses need to
carefully identify and evaluate solutions to deliver the content
and quality audiences want and expect at broadcast-size
scales."
As trends shift, there are particular CDN features that are
critical to businesses. More than 26 percent of respondents listed
multi-screen/multi-device as critical services, followed by
adaptive bitrate and analytics.
Additional report findings include:
- Seventy-eight percent of respondents prefer a delayed start and
then play without interruption, rather than stalling partway
through playback
- The largest limiting factor for a CDN strategy is delivery
costs/pricing control (48 percent), followed by economics of
scale/contracts (21 percent), internal delivery preference (15
percent) and unfamiliarity with CDN benefits (13 percent)
- Thirty percent of respondents deliver premium content, followed
closely by enterprise training videos (28 percent) and promotional
videos (15 percent)
There were more than 1,000 responses to the State of CDN
Services survey. Eighty-seven percent of the completed surveys
were from respondents who identified themselves as working for a
company that delivers online video, whether in live or on-demand
form.
About Akamai
Akamai® is the leading
provider of cloud services for delivering, optimizing and securing
online content and business applications. At the core of the
Company's solutions is the Akamai Intelligent Platform™ providing
extensive reach, coupled with unmatched reliability, security,
visibility and expertise. Akamai removes the complexities of
connecting the increasingly mobile world, supporting 24/7 consumer
demand, and enabling enterprises to securely leverage the cloud. To
learn more about how Akamai is accelerating the pace of innovation
in a hyperconnected world, please visit www.akamai.com or
blogs.akamai.com, and follow @Akamai on Twitter.
Contacts:
|
|
Chris
Nicholson
|
Tom Barth
|
Media
Relations
|
Investor
Relations
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617-444-2987
|
617-274-7130
|
cnichols@akamai.com
|
tbarth@akamai.com
|
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SOURCE Akamai Technologies, Inc.