High Performance Streaming Increases Site Traffic and Reduces Costs

32 radio stations…12 local television stations…21 specialty channels…Canada-based CHUM Limited is a true leader in multimedia content delivery, relying on the Internet to supplement traditional media and deliver powerful rich-media experiences to users throughout Canada and the world. As the popularity of CHUM’s Web sites grew and bandwidth usage increased, the company faced surges of Web site activity triggered by breaking news and events that frequently pushed their existing hosting and bandwidth infrastructure to its limits. This became painfully clear during the Pope’s visit to Toronto in 2002, when a traffic spike threatened to bring down the company’s servers and severely taxed internal resources.

As the popularity of CHUM's Web sites increased, the existing infrastructure began to experience crippling spikes in traffic during high profile events or breaking news stories. "Traffic surges were an enormous problem," says Dale Fallon, Manager of Operations at CHUM Interactive. In addition, the operational crisis created by these traffic spikes would zap internal resources and pull IT staff and content producers from their core duties to deal with the sagging infrastrcure.

With Akamai, CHUM Interactive was able to downsize their infrastructure, while increasing site traffic by 20% and saving 20% in infrastructure and maintenance costs.