Fastly is making live event and video-on-demand service updates to its cloud edge platform to help meet increased streaming demand brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“COVID has drastically accelerated the quantity and frequency of live streaming viewership that we were already seeing pre-pandemic,” said Lee Chen, vice president of corporate development and strategic partnerships at Fastly, in a statement. “The gap between those investing in streaming technologies and those who are not, is widening and becoming more prominent than ever before. Having the correct set of tools and technologies is essential for businesses to accelerate their digital transformation and stay ahead of their competitors.”
New features include Media Shield with Origin Insights, which the company said can help optimize multi-CDN deployments, reduce streaming costs and provide real-time analytics. The company is also adding live event monitoring and capacity reservations, which will let organizations reserve additional bandwidth to prepare for high-traffic events.
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“Fastly has been vital in providing us with the tools we need to efficiently run a multi-CDN environment. More specifically, Media Shield helps us unify our workflows and create more reliable experiences, happier customers, and higher levels of engagement,” said John Cool, vice president of digital media technology at A+E Networks, in a statement. “Fastly also does a great job caching our content, helping us achieve the scale we need to meet our peak demands while making sure our streaming costs are manageable as traffic increases.”
New VOD features include Device Detection, which allows video engineers to tailor content for a variety of device types, and an on-the-fly packager, which Fastly said can help organizations cut costs associated with duplicating content for different packaging HTTP streaming protocols. The company has also added VPN/proxy detection at the edge.