ASP testimonial

The Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) is the governing body of professional surfing, taking over for the International Professional Surfers organization, which ran things from 1976 to 1982. Sanctioning six professional surfing circuits around the world—including the Foster’s ASP World Tour, the ASP Women's World Tour, and the Master’s Championships—ASP is dedicated to showcasing the world's best surfing talent in a variety of progressive formats and challenging locations since 1983. In fact, the organization has built, grown, and revolutionized the sport of surfing by leveraging the Internet to offer real-time coverage of events around the globe. The ASP has evolved into a global organization delivering million-dollar events and the best of professional surfing to online fans around the world.

Before using the Akamai Stream OS solution, the association lacked the internal contentmanagement system needed to manage and distribute significant amounts of raw content over a low-speed connection. "Now we simply capture live streams, encode them onsite in various bitrates, and distribute them via Stream OS. Stream OS enables us to upload clips and make them available online in a matter of hours, from even the most remote locations. That is what keeps our content valuable and makes our audiences and sponsors happy. With the Akamai Media Framework, we were able to have iStreamPlanet, co. help us develop and standardize on a core media player that can be leveraged by all of our sponsors and affiliates. With iStreamPlanet's back-end tools, and Akamai's open framework, we can easily re-skin the player to brand it for the sponsors," says Ziul. "Akamai's Media Player Framework allowed us to easily hook into the Akamai network and the workflow tools in Stream OS. As a result, we were able to focus on the video-player design and experience rather than the behindthe-scenes production details. That, combined with our own media player technology, allowed us to launch a player for the Billabong Pipeline Masters in about a week," says Randy Levine, vice president of business development for iStreamPlanet.
Because Akamai makes it easy and fast to upload and transcode content, and provides the flexibility to distribute content in any format and at any speed, the association is now able to easily produce multiple concurrent events.

"Akamai has helped make the sport of surfing viable as a business. By leveraging the Internet as our distribution mechanism and Stream OS as our rich-media management solution, with just six crew members we can broadcast 30 contests from some of the most remote locations in the world and deliver the surfing experience to passionate fans around the world-from Brazil and Tahiti to Japan and Siberia"
—Mano Ziul, Chief Technology Officer, Association of Surfing Professionals