Akamai announces that Perform is leveraging Akamai’s global media delivery network to stream live coverage of major sporting events in the Adobe® Flash FLV format. Akamai’s Flash video format is unique in its ability to minimize latency and offer almost real-time coverage of popular sporting events.

Since using the Adobe Flash FLV video format, Perform has experienced peak hits of 775,843 for key events and peak traffic flow of 700 Mbits per second across Akamai’s platform. With a worldwide audience of over 15 million viewers, Perform delivers in excess of 10,000 live events and 35,000 edited clips per year for more than 200 web, broadband TV and mobile services. In order to deliver these services in real-time to its expanding user base, the company realised that it needed to improve the quality of the delivery and speed of its live performance video streaming.

Because of the real-time nature of sporting events, Perform realized it could have a competitive advantage by minimizing the latency between the live event and the time before the end-user views the stream on his/her PC. Perform embraced the Adobe Flash FLV video format which has the ability to significantly reduce latency and deliver live streams faster than any other format.

As an existing Akamai customer, Perform was already using the Akamai Media Delivery solution to stream events on its website and so they decided to look at delivering live events via Flash Akamai’s platform. Akamai Media Delivery also allows Perform to manage various rights restrictions to ensure only viewers in authorised regions can access footage so as not to infringe copyright.