Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the leader in powering video, dynamic transactions and enterprise applications online, today announced that it teamed with MLB.com, the official Web site of Major League Baseball, to deliver live streaming video of regular season and postseason games in 2009 over Akamai HD for iPhone within MLB.com’s award-winning application, At Bat 2009. Expanding on the long-term relationship between Akamai and MLB.com, the ability to deliver games over HTTP for live and on demand video content on the iPhone allowed MLB.com to increase its reach to fans who want to watch baseball games wherever they are.

“MLB.com improved the quality and reach of its real-time baseball game experience to mobile users via MLB.TV on the iPhone,” said Bob Hughes, Executive Vice President of Global Sales, Services and Marketing at Akamai. “We’re excited to work with MLB.com on changing the way fans experience the national pastime of baseball by offering live games over Akamai’s adaptive bit rate streaming technology. With Akamai HD for iPhone, high quality video experiences are no longer limited to the TV or computer.”

Because the solution automatically switches between different bitrate levels for live video, playback can begin immediately at a lower bitrate then switch to higher bitrates as conditions allow and end users with 3G connections experience rapid video start-up times and smooth playback. Full DVR capabilities are also designed to enable a personalized and interactive experience by allowing consumers to pause and rewind live video.

Using Akamai HD for iPhone to deliver live and on-demand content, MLB.com helped ensure fans had the same experience on the go as they did watching the games on their computers by leveraging Akamai’s highly-available and fault tolerant delivery infrastructure of tens of thousands of HTTP servers. Akamai’s solution takes advantage of native streaming support, which is optimized to increase battery life, reduce buffering, and provide a better video experience than possible with other streaming approaches for delivering video to mobile devices.

MLB.com’s live video within At Bat 2009 was encoded using Inlet Technologies’ Spinnaker™ live streaming appliances. MLB.com has been using Spinnaker encoders to power all mobile and live web experiences since 2008.

“MLB.com continues to provide the latest and greatest user experiences for its fan base,” said John Bishop, senior vice president of strategy and business development at Inlet. “We are happy to work with MLB.com to help leverage its existing Spinnaker infrastructure to help reach the iPhone community.”

Leveraging Akamai’s HD EdgePlatform of HTTP servers, Akamai HD for iPhone can support global audiences for major online events, and enables WiFi- and 3G Mobile-based access to content on the iPhone. By delivering content from servers that are closest to end users, Akamai HD for iPhone avoids traditional Internet congestion and latency issues. This translates into faster download times and the highest quality streams each end-user connection will allow.

Akamai Technologies, Inc., the leader in powering video, dynamic transactions and enterprise applications online, announced today it will serve as the exclusive live video streaming provider to Turner Sports for the official PGA Championship App available on the App Store. The 91st PGA Championship will be held August 13-16 with 18 hours of television coverage on TNT complemented by four video streams of live coverage exclusively on PGA.com.

The PGA Championship iPhone App for the iPhone and iPod touch supports Turner Sports’ integrated broadcast strategy of combining traditional television coverage with online and mobile components to provide fans with a multiplatform experience.

“Turner Sports is known for its innovation in presenting content across multiple platforms, and this is another example of that strategy,” said Tim Napoleon, Chief Strategist for Digital Media at Akamai. “Organizations like Turner Sports are leading the charge with live streaming and taking the fan experience to a whole new level to mobile devices. Streaming the PGA Championship live to the iPhone and iPod touch brings a personalized and high-quality experience to even more golf fans, no matter where they are. With increasingly better connectivity over WiFi, we’ve reached the point where high definition experiences are no longer limited to the PC.”

Variable bit rate streaming benefits the consumer by enabling a high fidelity viewing experience at any bitrate – critical for mobile video as viewing conditions vary dramatically between carrier edge networks to 3G to WIFI. Using Akamai HTTP Streaming for iPhone and Inlet Technologies SpinnakerTM solution to deliver live and on-demand content, content owners can enable higher-quality video experiences at near HD bitrates over WiFi and 3G.

“Inlet works closely with Akamai to ensure our live encoding service for mobile applications works seamlessly across the Akamai network to provide for the optimal live video experience,” said John Bishop, senior vice president of strategy and business development, Inlet Technologies. “Working with Akamai we are able to provide a smooth end to end process for content providers to make it easier to deliver next generation video experiences – such as variable bit rate streaming.”

Akamai Technologies Inc. announced variable bit rate streaming support for live and high quality video content on Apple Inc.’s iPhone and iPod touch products.

With the motto of “Powering a better Internet,” Cambridge-based Akamai specializes in technology that aims to provide speedy and rich Web content delivery.

“Variable bit rate streaming was a key feature delivered in the recent iPhone 3.0 update and this new capability expands Akamai’s ability to provide consumers with the highest quality video streaming experience on their iPhone or iPod touch,” said an Akamai press release, which added: “Akamai is also announcing the launch of the iPhone 3.0 Video Showcase – iphone.akamai.com – to demonstrate this new solution. Content owners and publishers including Canadian Broadcasting Corp, Discovery, FOX News, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, MTV, NPR, Turner Sports, and USA TODAY are participating in the showcase site.”

The image of iPhones that appears with this post was taken from Apple Inc.’s website.

http://iphone.akamai.com