Media streaming is here to stay. The $100 billion segment of the media industry has rapidly flipped its stance in the media landscape. Just over a decade ago, online streaming was a niche way to binge TV shows on your computer. Now, it’s the primary way that households consume both entertainment and essential information. A staggering 83% of American households subscribe to at least one streaming service, and there is an entire ecosystem of consumer hardware (including smart TVs) that has readily embraced the shift from broadcast or cable to streaming over the internet.
As media organizations have adapted to meet higher performance and user demands than ever, the underlying technology available in the cloud has not kept up. This leads to overpaying for CPU and GPU resources or relying on on-prem specialized hardware that limits (or prohibits) elastic scaling. NETINT, the makers of video processing units (VPUs), saw the opportunity to create application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) hardware for media transcoding in 2017. Now, more than 100,000 of their VPUs support media streaming for both major media streaming platforms and a wide range of media technology companies doing everything from low-latency live streaming to video-centric social media via on-prem and colocation center deployments.
Together, NETINT and Akamai are making VPUs more accessible than ever by offering cloud-based VPUs for the first time. Akamai’s Accelerated Compute plans with VPUs provide a carefully tailored and highly performant set of plans powered by VPUs that will help media organizations lower their cloud costs – deploying VPU-powered instances on Akamai Cloud starts at just $0.42 per hour, and providing 15-30x concurrent streaming performance compared to CPU-based transcoding.
No, that wasn’t a typo. Go from maxing out at 4 streams per dedicated CPU to up to 30 concurrent streams per VPU, and make your CPU resources available for other critical application tasks.
Smooth Streams Ahead: Insights from the Beta
With our long history as a technology partner to the media industry, it was no surprise that Akamai and NETINT shared customers already using on-prem VPUs. These customers were eager to test the technology in the cloud to verify its scalability, failover, and overall performance. In particular, they wanted to validate using hardware in the cloud for short-term expansions and proofs of concept without incurring the high cost of purchasing additional on-prem hardware.
One live streaming platform battle-tested accelerated instances to compare their preferred setup for CPU-based transcoding. They used dedicated CPUs and maxed out at 2-4 concurrent streams. But, when they tested the same setup with accelerated plans in the cloud, they discovered a much higher performance limit of 30 concurrent live streams on a single VPU.
For VOD, a social media platform focusing primarily on short-form video content tested accelerated instances and found that they could seamlessly quadruple their stream density by switching from Akamai Cloud Dedicated CPU to Accelerated, and at half the cost of their preferred Dedicated plan.
How to Get Started
Accelerated instances are now available to deploy in the following core compute regions:
- Los Angeles, USA (us-lax)
- Miami, USA (us-mia)
- Frankfurt, DE (de-fra-2)
- Chennai, IN (in-maa)
- Melbourne, AU (au-mel)
Browse our documentation to get started.
If you’re attending NAB Show at the Las Vegas Convention Center next week, here’s how you can see Akamai in action during the show.
- Visit the Akamai Cloud media specialists at W234LMR (West Hall, 2nd Floor).
- Catch Shawn Michels, VP of Product Management, presenting alongside NETINT and G&L Systemhaus during the Streaming Summit.
- Book a meeting to learn more about how accelerated instances can slash your cloud costs.
Custom Cloud VPU Deployments
If you’re interested in a large quantity of VPU-powered accelerated instances or looking for accelerated instances in specific core compute regions, contact our cloud sales team to start a conversation.
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