Content delivery network and cloud services provider Akamai Technologies Inc. announced new cloud capabilities for streaming video today that it says will help operators deliver higher-quality and more personalized content to viewers.

Announced at NAB 2023, the annual National Association of Broadcasters conference, the new features will help operators to realize lower and more predictable operational costs, Akamai said, improving their ability to monetize video streaming content.

Akamai said its new services are being made available through Akamai Connected Cloud, a newly launched, massively distributed edge and cloud platform for content delivery and development that’s designed to provide low-latency and high-performance experiences for viewers.

The most interesting new feature is Akamai’s enhanced support for the Consumer Technology Association’s CMCD specification, which enables device-based media players to send playback data to Akamai and other CDNs. It means Akamai can use CMCD to pre-fetch content intelligently, improving video startup times while reducing buffering. Another advantage is that video streaming providers gain more reliable metrics on the user’s video quality, aiding with reporting and analysis.

Akamai Vice President of Product Management Jon Alexander said Akamai Cloud provides computing services that are unique in their ability to cover the gamut of development, cost control and viewer experiences. “We’re giving OTT operators a host of powerful new cloud computing functions, scaling them across our global platform and backing them with Akamai content delivery and security services,” he said.

The new cloud services are being introduced alongside expanded use cases for the company’s EdgeWorkers serverless offering that address needs around content personalization, rights management and security for video streaming.

They include new manifest and playlist manipulation features that decrease the storage requirements and costs for operators while ensuring better performance for users. With these capabilities, EdgeWorkers can dynamically personalize manifest file elements such as bitrate ordering, resolution filtering and subtitles at the edge, closer to viewers.

Meanwhile, the new program replacement feature makes it possible for operators to deploy faster and more flexible pre-delivery content stitching for both live and on-demand video. Companies can insert content into video streams based on criteria such as the user’s geolocation and time of day, in order to satisfy requirements such as rights restrictions.

There’s also a new feature that allows operators to track and mitigate live and on-demand piracy with A/B content watermarking that’s compliant with the new DASH Industry Forum specification.

Finally, Akamai announced a host of new partner solutions for media workflows that have been certified as interoperable with Akamai Connected Cloud. They include video compression and delivery from Ateme SA, software-based video-on-demand transcoding, encoding and packaging from Capella Systems LLC, and interactive live streaming and video conferencing from LiveKit.

Photo: Jesus Loves Austin/Unsplash