Akamai Launches iPhone Video Streaming And Showcase Portal (iphone.akamai.com)

Today, Akamai "officially" announced support for variable bit rate streaming of live and on-demand video content for the iPhone and iPod touch and has launched a new showcase site at iphone.akamai.com. The site which has been live for about a month, showcases content from about a dozen content providers including FOX News, MTV and USA Today amongst others.

Akamai's new iPhone streaming service is based on the standard HTTP delivery protocol which for Akamai, means they can utilize more of their HTTP network infrastructure as opposed to proprietary based streaming protocols. Earlier in the week I came across the showcase site and tested the quality and while it looks pretty good, there were times when the video appeared choppy. Hard to know what exactly caused that as the videos as they play now, don't give you any performance or quality indicators in the player to know if your connection is having problems. That's one feature I'd like to see in the player and one that most PC based video players already have built in.

I have some videos of what the quality looks like on an iPhone and will post those shortly. Here's a short clip:

Comments

[Kieran Kunhya]

I'm a bit confused why their demo has videos at 853x480, which is larger than the screem size of the iPhone (which according to http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html is 480x320. Surely it would make sense to stream at the phone's native resolution.

(Or am I getting a different version because I visited in a normal browser?)

[bitonio]

@Kunhya

The website is different from a normal browser : it streams regular .mov file. Only iPhone OS 3.0 is able to play HTTP streaming. So you didn't see the mobile stream.

[Streaming Anatomy]

Although it runs over their HTTP infrastructure, it is again reminding me their low quality of their streaming-never-work-everywhere services and buffering-most-of-the-time qulity

[A Facebook User]

This is a great feature and congratulations. Also please let me tell you that after in depth research Eyepartner has developed a simple software kit (iPhone Broadcaster) that makes it easy for anyone to view high quality broadcasts originating from an on the shelf PC. It is designed to easily broadcast LIVE Events as well as Video On Demand Content.

[Tim Baldwin]

Kulabyte - http://www.kulabyte.com - better known for professional quality live HD flash encoding and streaming, also now can stream to iPhone using the same encoder that is streaming HD flash and it works great with Akamai's HTTP streaming.

[compareaholic]

Hmm a bit slow, but not bad I guess.