The majority of video content on NFL.com will be offered in higher quality across the Akamai HD Network, including NFL.com Live: Thursday Night Football, video highlights of every NFL game and coverage of other NFL events.

In addition, exclusive video within the new NFL Fantasy Football game will be offered in higher quality through Akamai’s HD Network.  The improved content will be made available in multiple bitrates up to 3.2 mbps.

"We think HD quality video will have the same impact online as it has on television," said Hans Schroeder, NFL vice president of media strategy and development.  

"Our multi-year partnership with Akamai will help us deliver the highest quality NFL video experience to our fans."

"The goal of the Open Video Player for HTML5  <video> is to provide a foundation to allow customers to quickly implement world-class solutions for cross platform/device/format video applications, providing their users with a consistent, high-quality experience through Akamai’s rich media management, delivery and measurement solutions," a spokesperson for Akamai tells WebProNews.

Akamai explains why this is important to the industry: "The iPhone is unique because it has rapidly become ubiquitous and the iPad is quickly following, with more than 2 million devices already sold. Akamai is working with many of our content owner and broadcasting customers on mobile delivery models. They are finding that when offering live or on-demand content they can quickly expand their available viewership by tens of thousands of global viewers by efficiently and seamlessly developing video experiences designed for these devices."

"With adaptive bitrate video technology that automatically adjust video quality levels based on a user’s connection speed (wifi, 3G, Edge) consistent security and analytics – all part of Akamai’s HD Network – content owners can deliver the highest possible quality video experiences – even 24×7 TV channels – on the portable devices," Akamai continues. "This toolkit will make it easier for them to create these experiences for the iPad and iPhone and better service their audiences through a portable, ‘best possible screen’ viewing approach."

The player provides a code library supporting industry best practices and standards such as CSS, JavaScript, HTML/HTML5 and Yahoo! Media RSS 2.0. Akamai says that this means customers can dramatically reduce the time it takes to create an HTML5 <video> based experience to support Apple’s iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod touch), as well as other browsers/devices supporting HTML5 <video>.

The toolkit can be found here.

Akamai, which deals in content delivery networks, is the organization that might be in Google’s good graces.  Some investors have accepted the idea to the point that they’ve sent Akamai’s stock up 3.38 percent so far today.

That’s not an inconsiderable amount, and there are some potential synergies between Google and Akamai.  Akamai is a believer in cloud computing, for one thing (which could tie to Google Apps), and it’s also interested in delivering HD video (which could benefit YouTube).

Doubters might want to consider what Eric Schmidt said 20 days ago regarding once-per-month acquisitions, as well.  If he intends to stick to that estimate, the clock is sort of ticking.

However, it’s far from certain that a takeover will occur.  Eric Savitz and Dan Rayburn don’t think it’ll go through.  Fil Zucchi added that he’s heard a lot of Akamai acquisition rumors before.  We’ll see what happens, then.

The top 10 portals saw about 90 percent of the attack traffic, with more than two-thirds of the traffic likely related to the Conficker worm.

In the first quarter, one-fifth of the Internet connections around the globe were at speeds higher than 5Mbps, a 5 percent increase from the prior quarter, and nearly a 30 percent increase over the same period last year. Worldwide, the average connection speed increased by about 11 percent, growing to 1.7 Mbps, and more than 120 countries had connection speeds under Mbps.

From a global connection speed perspective, Japan surpassed South Korea for the highest levels of broadband connectivity, though South Korea maintained the highest average connection speed, at 11 Mbps.

For the first time since publishing the State of the Internet report in the first quarter of 2008, South Korea no longer had the largest percentage of connections to Akamai at speeds above 5Mbps, with a 25 percent decline. The first place spot was taken by Japan, with 57 percent of connections to Akamai at high-speed broadband levels.

Continuing a trend started in 2008, the East Coast of the United States continued to lead the country in the greatest level of broadband connectivity, with 8 of the top 10 states on the list.

Delaware maintained its top 10 position, with 62 percent of connections at 5Mbps or greater, and the highest average connection speed in the United States, at 7.2 Mbps. Maine has nearly quadrupled its percentage of high speed broadband connection to Akamai since the first quarter of 2008.

As the largest day ever for the delivery of concurrent live streaming over the Akamai network, the company reported it reached a peak of over 7 million active simultaneous streams (the majority live streams) at around 12:15 p.m. today.

Total traffic on the network surpassed a rate of more than 2 terabits per second and the company also delivered over 12,000,000 requests per second at the same time.

"In addition to the historic nature of the Inauguration, it is now clear that this event has driven unprecedented demand from a global online audience," said Robert Hughes, executive vice president of Global Sales, Services, and Marketing at Akamai.

"With the Inauguration occurring during work-day hours in the U.S., we witnessed record numbers of live streams served in support of many leading news businesses. While this event was supported flawlessly for our broadcast customers, it is also important to point out that Akamai continued to deliver perfect quality of service for the remainder of our 2,800 enterprise customers. This is just the beginning of what is possible when broadcasting live to audiences around the world."

Akamai said its Net Usage Index for News also saw a significant traffic peak today. The index indicated that at about 11:45 a.m. there were over 5.4 million visitors per minute looking for news online.
 

The Internet logged 8,572,042 visitors per minute as of 11:00 PM Tuesday, November 4, 2008, the moment Obama was declared the winner. The previous peak, 7,283,584 visitors per minute, had been held since June 22, 2006, win the US lost to Ghana in the World Cup.

Luckily for those Internet consumers, the behind-the-scenes heroes of IT were prepared for the onrush. Hosting companies increased new hardware and load-balancing services, while political sites like DailyKos beefed up their backend in advance.

Looks like it worked because, aside from Cogent’s little spat with Spint (wonder how much that affected political traffic?), the Internet was thriving under one heckuva traffic test.

The Google Blog put together a nice list of what all those people were looking for in advance of heading to the polls. Interesting to see Chuck Norris take his place between Joe Biden and Cindy McCain. Also interesting was to see a large number of people boning up on the tenets of socialism, perhaps to measure official definitions against the Republican definition.

Here are a few of those top ten search gainers from yesterday:

Top Political Personas
Obama
Palin
McCain
Tina Fey
Joe Biden
Chuck Norris
Cindy McCain
Bristol Palin
SNL Palin
Colin Powell

Top Political Topics
debate
Social Security
presidential debate
polls
voter registration
gas prices
oil prices
FDIC
electoral college
Socialism

Top Political News Sources
Drudge
Huffington Post
Gallup
Real Clear Politics
Rasmussen
Rush Limbaugh
Politico
538
CNN Politics
Daily Kos

In its position as a premier content delivery service, Akamai holds a perspective on Internet traffic, both good and malicious, that few others can match. The firm plans to share some of its observations through a new report.

An initial summary from Akamai for the first three months revealed how malicious attacks originated in 125 countries around the world. China and the United States represented the top two countries where attacks began.

The two nations accounted for roughly 30 percent of the origination of attacks during those three months. Many attacks focused on 23 unique ports, with attempts to deliver a host of malware through them.

Microsoft’s Remote Procedure Call port 135 saw the most attacks hitting it, with nearly 30 percent of attacks trying to break into systems that way. Another 13 percent tried to tag NetBIOS through port 139.

Akamai also looked at connection speeds for Internet users around the globe. South Korea topped the list of countries with 5Mbps or greater connections, with 64 percent having those. The United States, with its concentration of broadband in the hands of a few multi-billion dollar telcos, comes in at a miserable seventh place with 20 percent, behind Belgium’s 21 percent, embarrassingly enough.

Even Romania has more high-speed connections as a percentage of population than the country that invented the Internet in the first place. At least the US managed to stay ahead of Nepal, albeit not by very much.

Net Neutrality, especially when you get into the technical minutia of the debate, can be a dense and difficult concept, and often advocates have to fall back on an I-know-a-violation-when-I-see-it argument. Too often this observation comes after a perceived breach of consumer trust and rights as a proof of concept.

Tim Lee, though, does a good job of putting Net Neutrality in the simplest of terms:

"Network neutrality is about the routing of packets. A network is neutral if it faithfully transmits information from one end of the network to the other and doesn’t discriminate among packets based on their contents. Neutrality is, in other words, about the behavior of the routers that move packets around the network."

It’s about other things, too, but that’s about as succinct an answer for a difficult concept you’ll find. It’s also about not allowing network providers to interfere with the information flow across the network, which is something ISP consumers expect, and not allowing them to create faster highways for the highest bidders, effectively creating entry barriers for low budget newcomers to the online market.

This is where the Akamai distinction comes in. Akamai provides a caching and redirection service for clients in order to speed up load times and relieve congestion on the network. According to Net Neutrality opponents, this amounts to (perhaps only at its semantic base) not just a tiered network – where a client pays for speedier delivery –  but also an interference with or manipulation of data.

The problem, says University of Pennsylvania law professor Christopher Yoo (the Net Neutrality antithesis to Columbia’s Timothy Wu), lies with redirecting a requested URL to a cached version on an Akamai server:

"The problem is that content delivery networks violate network neutrality. Not only does URL redirection violate the end-to-end argument by introducing intelligence into the core of the network; the fact that content delivery networks are commercial entities means that their benefits are available only to those entities willing to pay for their services."

Lee isn’t sure that argument holds water:

"This might be a violation of some extremely broad version of network neutrality, and there’s certainly reason to worry that an overzealous future FCC might start trying to regulate the relationship between ISPs and Akamai. But Akamai is not, as Yoo would have it, evidence that the Internet is already non-neutral."

Lee also agues that Akamai works at the application level, like the Web or email, by adding servers near the end user to increase efficiency for the end user, and not at the network level.

Other distinctions include that redirection to mirrored content is not interference with access to that content and there is no intelligence involved in the process. It is not an ISP double-dipping by creating chokepoints and effectively walling off content for reasons that suit their purposes.

Net Neutrality would mandate that ISPs provide the access for a fair price and then get out of the way. Improving the efficiency and speed with which people (the ISP customers) can find and disseminate information is not a violation of Net Neutrality principles. Favoring Yahoo over Google and purposefully making one search engine faster while degrading the other, would be a violation.   
 

Akamai Visualizes The Internet

Akamai has become more of a fixture on the Internet as the number of web surfers increased year after year, and demanded better connectivity to the various resources online. The growth of rich media applications, particularly online video, has put Akamai in a position where it is delivering as much as a fifth of the Internet’s traffic each day.

Their Visualizing The Internet website shows visualizations of the traffic density online. Virus outbreaks and malicious attacks cause spikes in traffic that Akamai can see.

A latency display shows the cities that are performing the worst at that moment when it comes to Internet connectivity. Akamai’s data shows the absolute and relative latency for those cities; at press time, users in Chicago and Atlanta were seeing some of the poorest latency for their connections.

Visitors may be interested in knowing what Akamai knows about them. The data they can collect with their geolocation service showed my connection coming from Lexington. It knew the county, local area code, and general latitude and longitude for the connection, which they rated as ‘vhigh’ for throughput (presumably ‘very high’.)

The visualizations Akamai can make available look like part of a broader marketing effort for their distributed computing platform and ancillary services. They certainly see a lot more information than what the visualization website displays.

In considering that, we have to wonder if Akamai will someday have to deal with the sort of privacy backdraft Google experiences over the search engine data it sees. Akamai’s impressive view of the Internet sees a lot more than just some queries at a search engine.

The closing of the transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals and the approval of Speedera’s stockholders, is expected to occur in the second quarter of 2005. The acquisition is expected to be accretive on a normalized, diluted per share basis in 2005.

The acquisition of Speedera is expected to enable Akamai to better compete against larger managed services vendors. Akamai and Speedera provide businesses with a cost-effective, distributed platform for accessing Web computing and capacity on demand worldwide without having to make significant upfront investments in infrastructure. The acquisition also will provide customers with a broader suite of services available on the world’s largest, high-performance distributed computing platform for the delivery and acceleration of Web content and applications.

As businesses and government agencies strive for a more dynamic and interactive presence on the Web, and as they migrate more business processes online, leading technology analysts have identified that the demand for outsourced content and applications acceleration solutions will continue to expand. To compete online, enterprises must ensure that their customers, suppliers and partners receive a fast, reliable, scalable and secure Web experience.

“The combination of Akamai and Speedera will provide customers with the best attributes of both companies,” said Paul Sagan, president and CEO-elect of Akamai. “Akamai and Speedera are customer-focused companies that emphasize leading-edge technology development to help businesses and government agencies to deliver more effective, higher performing, and lower cost Websites and online applications. We believe that this combination will benefit our customers, employees and shareholders.”

Akamai was founded in 1998, and Speedera was founded in 1999.

“My colleagues and I at Speedera are very proud of what we have accomplished since the company’s founding,” said Ajit Gupta, president, CEO and founder of Speedera Networks. “We have built a global network, acquired hundreds of customers, and delivered great services that make it possible for our customers to operate more successful online businesses. When we join forces with Akamai, our customers will have access to an even larger, global network and a wider portfolio of leading-edge services supported by a combination of the most experienced teams in the industry.”

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