Here's a little comparison I did a while back:
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/qual... (full details at http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=102)
Now consider the fact that the majority of websites are still using VP6 or Flash Media Encoder FLV, both of which are significantly worse than Xvid on the chart...
Of course, given that money doesn't grow on trees, many of the top players have switched--Youtube and Facebook are now using x264 almost exclusively, for example.
I would be entirely unsurprised if Akamai ended up being suckered by a company providing inferior solutions. Of course, they don't lose anything by providing worse compression, since their customers pay them for the bandwidth.
And h264 over HTTP is just a download of the HTTP file starting from a specific marker unless I'm mistaken. Not exactly rocket science. It's HTTP after all...you can't control much of anything on the QOS side. The JW player has the capability to do that out of the box for most of the major CDN networks out there already.
The SilverLight demo worked better, but the picture was worse than the Flash version.
BitGravity works wonderfully though. Also, we've been using Panther/CDNetworks without a hitch. They even support HTTP pseudo streaming.
Not only that it was taking 90% of my CPU to display something that did not look even close to 720p in size. And how can they get away with calling that looks more like 360p HD, anyway? I am not impressed.
It's good to be the incumbent.
Ah yes, Akamai as always picking features that maximize the money you owe them.
For the vast majority of content (e.g. anything not live), constant bitrate is a terrible idea: it wastes bandwidth in low-action parts of the video and cripples quality in high-action parts of the video. This is why no major non-live video site uses constant bitrate; it's a terrible idea.
Of course, if you want to maximize user quality at all times, you want to maximize utilization of their connection and adapt the bitrate to the bandwidth available. But in reality, bandwidth is expensive, so nobody does this except in live streams.
1) HTTP delivery of live flash content (avoids royalty fees normally paid to Adobe for FMS, so ideally Akamai could lower their prices)
2) Improved analytics (current EdgeControl interface is tricky to use for individual videos)
The rest of the features listed are just current features wrapped up into a nice looking press release. In other words... move along, nothing to see here.
