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TVU Networks Slashed Cloud Costs

Leading cloud IP streaming provider minimized egress expenses through strategic partnership with Akamai

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“For complex distribution workflows, we choose the option that gives us the highest margins. That choice is often Akamai.”

John Wastcoat, Senior Director, Business Development, TVU Networks

Driving the future of live IP video workflows

TVU Networks, a leading company in live IP video production, faced escalating cloud egress costs and challenges scaling workflows for global live video distribution. By harnessing Akamai’s cloud computing services, it optimized operations and decreased costs while expanding globally.

Evolving from hardware to cloud solutions

Founded 25 years ago, TVU Networks began as a hardware-based solution provider for live video signal contribution. Over the past decade, it reinvented itself, moving to a software as a service (SaaS) model and gaining traction in sports and news broadcasting, serving major clients like Fox, ABC, and ESPN. More recently, it made a pivotal transition to a cloud-based approach with APIs and microservices that adapt to diverse infrastructures worldwide — empowering its customers and partners to seamlessly leverage TVU Networks’ offerings.

Navigating cost pressures in cloud infrastructure

Before engaging Akamai, TVU Networks grappled with the prohibitive costs of traditional hyperscalers. “Contribution is easy. Distribution is pricey when you have high egress costs. We needed a backup for our distribution-intensive workflows,” explained John Wastcoat, Senior Director, Business Development at TVU Networks. 

This realization set the stage for exploring alternatives offering better pricing models while addressing the company’s vast production needs The driving force was clear: find reliable cloud services that ensured efficient global distribution of TVU Networks’ platform and solutions. “We needed a solution that would help us maintain a competitive edge,” said Wastcoat.

Choosing Akamai for strategic savings

Customer demands spurred the initial decision to partner with Akamai. When TVU Networks’ customer requested the streaming provider run its software on Akamai, the company kicked off an assessment. 

The financial benefits made the choice clear. TVU Networks analyzed potential scenarios — such as two sources delivered to 80 destinations — to understand egress and compute costs with Akamai. “The answers revealed significant cost reductions that resonated across all our teams, from sales and product management to engineering,” explained Wastcoat.

A network and partnership built for global demand

Initially, the company moved its TVU Grid solution to Akamai, laying the groundwork for broader adoption across its product suite. Akamai’s dedicated teams played a crucial role during the migration process. “Their support was invaluable, confirming our confidence in them from the outset,” he continued. 

Akamai’s expansive network and multipath distribution give TVU Networks the reliability it needs to serve live video across borders, with a consistency it can trust in high-demand regions. “This network reliability empowers us to deliver high-quality live video content across the globe, no matter the location,” noted Wastcoat.

Optimizing for dynamic needs

TVU Networks found that Akamai’s comprehensive suite of cloud computing services was an ideal match for its needs. With solutions like Block Storage enabling efficient data management and CPU and LKE: Managed Kubernetes Engine supporting robust workload processes, the company was able to streamline its operations significantly.

“Akamai provides everything necessary for complex deployments, allowing us to scale effortlessly. It feels like a cloud router, supporting countless inputs and outputs with complex signaling at scale, all while easing transport and egress cost concerns,” Wastcoat explained.

Setting the stage for ongoing growth

Looking ahead, TVU Networks sees Akamai as a key partner in its ongoing growth. With the migration of mission-critical platforms to Akamai complete, it’s ready to leverage the companies’ combined strengths, attracting new customers and elevating service offerings. “Akamai has proven to be an invaluable partner in our journey. Together, we are positioned for even greater success in delivering superior live video experiences,” Wastcoat concluded.

We're partnering with Akamai to globally expand our live IP streaming initiatives. We're collaborating with the Linode team, very flexible platform, working with multiple organizations, and then working with the field sales team to find more opportunities, collaborating on new and exciting initiatives.

So the start of the relationship has been great, and we're going in a good direction. TVU was for 10 years, focused on the live contribution space, but in the last 10 years has created a lot of cloud-first live microservices that allow our customers, partners, to quickly and flexibly adopt different technologies and put them into their ecosystems.

So somebody can grab something that in the past would have taken a month to integrate, now it takes a day. They can get that into their product, get that onto a platform for a customer, and we're both solving a problem together.

Akamai has been great in helping us quickly deploy our services on the Akamai platform, and very responsive to any issues that we've got in that early deployment, development phase. And then once it's gone to market, it just works.

So now we're in a space where we are taking these products to market in combination with Akamai and working with the global commercial team to make both more accessible.

 

Partnership is the first thing that I think about. They really want to help us succeed so that our mutual customers succeed, and that's a common DNA that we've got. They're very helpful. They want to make it as an easy experience as possible. It's very flexible, and they'll help you achieve what you're looking to get done.

About TVU Networks

TVU Networks is a global technology leader in live IP video solutions, working closely with broadcasters to design flexible, customer-centric workflows for live production and content distribution.

About Akamai

Akamai is the cybersecurity and cloud computing company that powers and protects business online. Our market-leading security solutions, superior threat intelligence, and global operations team provide defense in depth to safeguard enterprise data and applications everywhere. Akamai’s full-stack cloud computing solutions deliver performance and affordability on the world’s most distributed platform. Global enterprises trust Akamai to provide the industry-leading reliability, scale, and expertise they need to grow their business with confidence. Learn more at akamai.com and akamai.com/blog, or follow Akamai Technologies on X and LinkedIn.

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