Akamai has announced a set of new live streaming features for its platform in anticipation of a viewership surge in late 2020 and into 2021. Akamai forecasts that a single event could have 50 million concurrent streamers, approximately double what events have seen in the past. The company cited the Summer Olympics which have been pushed to 2021 and UEFA EURO as sporting events expected to drive record live streaming in narrow time windows.

Akamai said the pandemic generated peak traffic on its platform exceeding 100 terabits per second every day during Q2 ’20; for context, the 100 terabit per second threshold was broken for the first time in October ’19. Akamai cited video games, in-game live events and esports tournaments, in addition to SVOD/AVOD consumption, as key traffic drivers.

To support the expected surge in live streaming, Akamai announced the following platform enhancements:

Developer APIs to simplify provisioning of Media Services Live and Adaptive Media Delivery workflow components and increase operational efficiency.

Live clipping feature for use cases such as highlight creation and event replays. A recent report from Ring Digital found that monetization of sports clips in the U.S. alone is between $2.7 billion and $4.5 billion.

Multi-CDN support in its Cloud Wrapper feature to enable it as central place for customers’ delivery architecture.

Support for low-latency HLS with target latency of less than 3 seconds for Apple video players.

Updated Access Revocation feature allowing quicker response times and better scalability to stop unauthorized streams.

Akamai will be hosting its Edge Live | Adapt conference on November 10 and 11 for a deeper dive into live streaming and other platform capabilities.