Akamai and Brightcove Team to Raise the Bar on Global Online Video Experiences

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Aug. 11 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Akamai Technologies (Nasdaq: AKAM), the leading provider of cloud optimization services, and Brightcove, the leading online video platform, today announced a wide-ranging alliance to drive quality, performance, and innovation in the online video industry.  The agreement between the companies is designed to bring together two of the most widely-used cloud-based platforms for professional online video to create a powerful, end-to-end offer that makes high-quality video publishing and distribution easily available for businesses and organizations of all sizes.  Brightcove will provide the Akamai HD Network as a bundled component of the Brightcove online video platform service.

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Brightcove offers a comprehensive solution for video content management, encoding, publishing, monetization and analytics, while Akamai's HD Network provides customers with global reach, full adaptive bit rate streaming, faster start-up times, and interactivity for their online video assets.  The two companies have a combined customer base that includes the leading media, e-commerce, and enterprise companies, as well as small businesses around the globe.  The integrated solution is designed to give customers a fast, seamless path to leverage the proven advantages of Akamai's HD Network and Brightcove's feature-rich online video platform to deliver high quality, adaptive bit rate video across Flash and iOS devices.  

"We've already seen a tipping point with adoption of high definition video online, and now we're seeing similar customer interest in seamless ways for enterprises big and small to use video to attract, engage, and retain online audiences," said Paul Sagan, Akamai President and Chief Executive Officer.  "Our alliance with Brightcove is important because it is designed to enable companies to have easy access to the high quality delivery made possible by the Akamai HD Network, and they will now have it instantly and around the world."  

"Online video has become as ubiquitous as text on the Web, creating increased demand for high quality video experiences across all screens," said Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. "Brightcove and Akamai share a strong commitment to online video quality and providing the best user experience possible, and together we expect to set the standard for innovation in the industry and accelerate the adoption of new technologies throughout the world."

Brightcove is now a part of the Akamai HD Network partner ecosystem.  Akamai's HD Network was developed with the goal of delivering the highest quality experience at broadcast audience scale(1) across the industry's most popular devices, platforms and runtimes, and enabling content owners to increase audience engagement and expand revenues through higher quality video playback and interactivity.  Akamai's HD Network was further designed to deliver live and on-demand content while leveraging an infrastructure of tens of thousands of HTTP servers deployed globally in ISP networks.  For more information on Akamai's HD Network, please visit www.akamai.com/hdnetwork.

Akamai is also now part of the Brightcove Alliance partner ecosystem.  The Brightcove Alliance is a global ecosystem of more than 200 leading technology and distribution partners who have integrated with the Brightcove online video platform, as well as solution providers building customer websites and video applications using Brightcove.  Through the Brightcove Alliance, organizations worldwide have access to a broad range of expert partners, pre-integrated technologies and services to support online video initiatives of any size and scope in every market. For more information on the Brightcove Alliance, please visit www.brightcove.com/en/partners.

About Brightcove

Brightcove is a cloud-based online video platform. Media companies, businesses and organizations worldwide use Brightcove to publish and distribute video on the Web. Founded in 2004, Brightcove has offices across North America, Europe and Asia and customers in 48 countries. For more information, visit http://www.brightcove.com.

About Akamai

Akamai® provides market-leading, cloud-based services for optimizing Web and mobile content and applications, online HD video, and secure e-commerce. Combining highly-distributed, energy-efficient computing with intelligent software, Akamai's global platform is transforming the cloud into a more viable place to inform, entertain, advertise, transact and collaborate. To learn how the world's leading enterprises are optimizing their business in the cloud, please visit www.akamai.com and follow @Akamai on Twitter.

The release contains information about future expectations, plans and prospects of Akamai's management that constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors including, but not limited to, the effects of any attempts to intentionally disrupt our services or network by hackers or others, unexpected termination of Akamai's relationship with Brightcove, changes in Brightcove's technology or to Akamai's technology such that such technologies are no longer inter-operable, failure of markets to develop as Akamai expects, a failure of Akamai's network infrastructure, and other factors that are discussed in Akamai's Annual Report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and other documents periodically filed with the SEC.

(1) Defined as the average Nielsen audience

SOURCE Akamai Technologies, Inc.