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Published on: September 2007
Type of content: WHITE PAPER
Format: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) (371 kb)
Length: 8 pages
Price: FREE

Overview:
Consumer demand for better content experiences continues to rise. With its high-fidelity pictures and sound, HD video offers viewers a way to experience content like never before—via television, DVD or broadband. While producing and broadcasting high definition content requires extensive re-tooling and investment by both providers and consumers, the HD Web is by comparison a simpler undertaking. No special transmitters are required, and consumers need only their broadband connections to receive it.

Viewers’ expectations for HD Web content are equally straightforward: It has to look good, and it has to be available on demand. Providing this experience consistently, however, is not as simple as it appears.

Specifically, HD video files are large, and require extremely high throughput for uninterrupted, high-speed delivery. When they traverse the Internet en route from centralized infrastructures or centralized content delivery networks, these files encounter delays and failures specific to the capacity they require and the distance they have to travel to get to the viewer—namely latency, packet loss and peering problems. Files can take longer to download than they do to watch. They get interrupted; or delay for re-buffering; or the number of users that may access them is limited. In short, the experience is compromised.

Despite Internet traffic that’s increasing 50% year over year, the capacity required to deliver a high-quality HD Web experience does exist. It’s at the ‘edge’ of the Internet, leveraging the massive build-outs occurring in hundreds of networks worldwide. Only Akamai’s highly distributed computing platform delivers content from within those networks, harnessing their capacity to accelerate downloads, serve HD content in its entirety, and scale to reach unlimited audiences—ultimately driving adoption of the HD Web.