Adobe testimonial

Adobe is always weighing what it can handle in-house versus when it needs to partner. "We considered a do-it-yourself approach for delivering the rich media of the Tour Tracker. But the Internet is inherently a difficult environment. The go-it-alone approach to content delivery would be difficult and costly, and would leave us with a great deal of risk. Akamai has a consistent track record for reliability and performance. Equally important is that Akamai is always willing to push the envelope and work with us to take both of our ideas and technologies to new levels" explains Michael Gough, VP of Experience Design at Adobe.

As a lead sponsor of The AMGEN Tour of California professional bicycle stage race—an eight-day, 700-mile race on a route that includes the California redwoods, wine country and the Pacific Coast—Adobe set out to push the envelope with it's online coverage by creating a rich, interactive tour tracking application overlaid on a live Flash video feed. The AMGEN Tour of California 2006 turned out to be one of the largest spectator sporting events in the country with over 1.3 million spectators, and the official AMGEN Tour of California Web site served over 15 million page views. As cycling in America enjoys unprecedented fanfare and popular success, partly as a result of Lance Armstrong's seven consecutive Tour de France triumphs, Adobe knew it needed to deliver a rich, interactive experience on its live portal to even more online spectators in 2007. During the AMGEN Tour of California 2007, Akamai's global streaming network supported more than 4 Gbps of Live Flash streaming traffic utilizing the VP6 codec, and enabled 8,000 simultaneous viewers to experience the race from the cyclists' perspective.

"By serving over 2 Gbps Flash streaming traffic daily—and scaling to serve 4 Gbps—Akamai was easily able to meet the skyrocketing demand for Flash content."
—Michael Gough, VP of Experience Design, Adobe