By Justin Lee, theWHIR.com
September 24, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Content delivery network provider Akamai Technologies (akamai.com) announced on Wednesday it is powering online video broadcaster Metacafe (metacafe.com).
Metacafe had previously enlisted the services of content delivery network Limelight Networks as its exclusive content delivery network provider.
Late last year, Metacafe implemented a combination of Akamai’s media delivery and rich media site acceleration solutions to optimize the delivery of rich, heavy web pages, videos and dynamic content, which resulted in achieving a 30 percent improvement in video start time.
This improvement has been greatly instrumental in contributing to significant growth in both page views and video views on Metacafe, increasing by 44 and 53 percent respectively between January and July 2008.
With more than 34 million unique viewers in more than 180 countries, according to comScore Media Metrix in June, Metacafe is considered the world’s largest video site focused exclusively on short-form entertainment, says the company.
Akamai’s globally-distributed content delivery and acceleration platform to improve performance across static pages, dynamic elements and video viewing for increased consumption, creating a complete high quality web application experience.
Since site performance can directly affect engagement metrics like video consumption, page views and time spent on the site, page load times are an essential element for any company.
Metacafe says it aims at achieving page load times of a sub-second and under a half a second for videos to load, to maintain and grow its audience in the competitive video entertainment market.
As a result, the advanced routing and connection optimization technologies in Akamai’s rich media acceleration solution have helped Metacafe in achieving these goals.
Akamai says its rich media acceleration capabilities use a globally-distributed network with techniques to improve aspects of page performance that are often slowed by web and public Internet protocols.
Metacafe is able to accelerate the rendering of each dynamic component of any page, as well as reduce infrastructure costs by offloading traffic across Akamai’s highly distributed network.
“In our business, it’s critical that we deliver a truly on-demand entertainment experience – when someone wants to watch a video, we want to be sure they can start watching right away and without interruption,” says Yaron Finkel, vice president of research and development at Metacafe. “Akamai helps us deliver on this promise. Keeping viewers on our site to watch multiple short videos in one session is an important part of building our business – the more videos we serve, the more ads we serve, which is good for our content partners, advertisers and bottom line.”
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