Alongside its efforts to expand into new areas such as security and access management, Akamai Technology Inc. is continuously improving its core content delivery services.

The provider today launched a technology called Akamai Media Acceleration that is designed to speed up the transfer of large files over the web. As the name suggests, it’s geared mainly towards handling video content, which networking giant Cisco Systems Inc. expects to account for about 80 percent of all worldwide web traffic by 2020. Netflix Inc. alone already already generates over a third of all the data consumed in North America during peak evening hours.

The video streaming giant uses its own content delivery network to handle the content consumed by users, but there are plenty of other players for Akamai to target. One of the ways its new technology promises to help providers improve their services is by harnessing an experimental networking protocol called QUIC. It’s an alternative to UDP, one of the communications standards at the core of the web, that can transmit data with considerably less latency.

Akamai claims that its implementation can not only reduce interruptions during streaming but also help increase video quality. Its launch announcement boasts that Vimeo, one of the first major website operators to have adopted Akamai Media Acceleration, has seen a “marked increase” in high-definition playbacks since coming aboard.

The technology is available as part of the content delivery provider’s Adaptive Media Delivery offering. Customers can also access it through the complementary Download Delivery service, which is designed for speeding up software downloads.

The introduction of Akamai Media Acceleration comes hot on the heels of the company upgrading its core website optimization platform to provide better support for mobile devices. Among others, the update introduced a feature called Adaptive Acceleration that can adjust how page elements are loaded based on the reliability of a user’s connection. It works not only with native content but also ads, traffic trackers and other components powered by third parties.

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