fuboTV teams with Akamai for OTT football
September 22, 2015
Content Delivery Network specialist Akamai has confirmed that fuboTV has selected Akamai’s Media Delivery Solutions to support its over-the-top (OTT) football streaming service. fuboTV is using Akamai to deliver broadcast-quality live and on-demand football content to viewers worldwide while helping reduce costs and manage regional licensing agreements. Launched in January 2015, fuboTV delivers 30 to 40 live football games each week and hundreds of hours of VOD content to viewers across connected devices.
Since transitioning to Akamai and away from managing its own transcoding servers and numerous third-party providers, fuboTV successfully delivered two of football’s largest events, El Clasico and Copa America. Not only has it improved playback performance; the company says it has done so while saving thousands of dollars each month by avoiding server upgrades, with the expectation that the savings will eventually be even greater over time.
Sung Ho Choi, CTO, fuboTV, credits Akamai’s close collaboration, world-class solutions and proven global delivery for his team’s ability to cost-effectively stream reliable, broadcast-quality content to viewers anytime, anywhere. “With predictability in pricing being a key priority as we went global, we found Akamai to be the only real option to help us cost-effectively deliver live matches. I had always planned to take advantage of Akamai’s services and was pleased that it made economic sense to use them during our start-up phase,” said Choi. “The transition went smoothly because Akamai has battle-tested its solutions and developed clear procedures for migration and going live.”
fuboTV leverages Akamai’s Adaptive Media Delivery, which includes token authentication that grants authorised viewers access to premium content, and content targeting for compliance with regional licensing agreements. The company also uses Akamai’s NetStorage cloud-based storage platform and Media Services Live to quickly deploy and scale live events at high quality.
“fuboTV’s customers expect an instantaneous, high-quality stream whenever they want and wherever they are,” said John Bishop, CTO of Media at Akamai. “With the help of Akamai’s Media Delivery Solutions, fuboTV delivers optimal viewing experiences through OTT streaming that is on par with – or better than – what’s experienced on traditional television.”