Akamai begins offering video processing units in the cloud

Akamai Cloud Accelerated Compute Instances, the latest initiative from Akamai, is composed of new instances driven by video processing units (VPUs) of Netint, which allows you to streamline workloads in environments such as streaming.

The accelerated instances of Akamai They have the technology of VPU Quadra T1U, a single-chip solution that supports encoding resolutions up to 8Kp60 in industry-standard formats such as AV1, HEVC y H.264 with 8/10-bit support, including HDR. As the “highest density encoding hardware available,” in Akamai's own words, the Quadra T1U VPU can encode 32 live streaming events with broadcast quality 1080p30, and with capacity adjusting linearly for resolutions above or below HD.

Previously, the only way to deploy Netint VPU hardware was to purchase it outright and run it on-premises or in a colocation facility. Now, it can be deployed in the cloud with Akamai Accelerated Compute Instances, which is designed for media companies offering video-on-demand and live streaming services, providing the necessary scalability without increasing IT budgets. In the words of Francisco Arnau, regional vice president of Akamai for Spain and Portugal: “Now companies can reduce costs, scale seamlessly and deliver better streaming experiences, solving a major industry challenge that has been overlooked for too long.”

Netint VPUs allow companies to reallocate the CPUs of your applications by offloading compute-intensive video processing tasks to the VPU. In this way, a VPU architecture offers “up to 20 times greater” performance than solutions that only use the CPU. This frees up the CPU to do other things like dynamic packaging, deinterlacing, generating real-time subtitles from speech-to-text, decoding unsupported standards on the VPU, and running popular applications such as Ffmpeg and GStreamer.

Akamai is striving to become the cloud for media content and to capture areas of the market that solution providers hyperscalable they overlook. Trusted by the top 10 video streaming services, Akamai's media services include contribution, transport, transcoding, packaging, digital rights management, ad insertion and content security.