Akamai Revolution Conference 2010

The 3-day Akamai global-user conference took place in Miami this year, in mid-October. Having a conference in your hometown takes some of the magic out of it — the proximity to the office does not let us leave the day-to day business behind for a few days.

We went for two things:

1) To find out how far the "HD network" live streaming has evolved: they are working on allowing the injection of a single high-quality stream and to encode to various formats on the edge of the network. It will come and it is very exiting, but we believe it will be at least another year.

2) To take a look at what the vendors for online video encoding and management systems have to offer.
It will take us a few weeks to properly evalute the solutions we saw, but here are some of the things we liked at first glance:

• Inlet Spinnaker HD-X 8100 encoder appliance  (Ok, we are tainted on this one. We have been working with the Inlet encoder since August of last year), http://inlethd.com/
• Encoding.com, cloud-based video encoding with a straight-forward API, and yes they are at http://encoding.com
• Ooyala, complete online video platform, http://www.ooyala.com
• Kaltura, online video platform targeting the enterprise market, http://kaltura.com 

And we enjoyed some smart keynotes, among them the one by AOL CEO Tim Armstrong.