12 Executive Summary Embracing change
Tom Leighton Co-Founder and CEO, Akamai
Region: Worldwide Interviewed by: Adrian Pennington
theibcdaily
The billion dollar question
“Our mission is to make the internet work the way you’d want it to,” states Tom Leighton. “We want it to be really secure, really scalable, really efficient and really affordable.”
Akamai, the ten billion dollar company he co-founded in 1998, delivers a large fraction of the media consumed worldwide. “IBC is very important to us, a large number of our partners are here and we have a chance to see the latest developments related to media.” That more video delivery is by IP is clear but the stats for delivery of the World Cup are still startling. Akamai alone managed 5 million concurrent users over its platform at one point, delivering 7 terabits per second of traffic for a single match. Streaming media from that event was 10 times as large as the World Cup 2010: “And the next World Cup will be 10 times
greater again,” predicted Leighton. “There is so much more you can do over the internet. Interactive experiences, different forms of content, multiple different camera angles, companion stats – all at a viewer's command. It's a much richer experience.”
Couple that with the Internet of Things and there are countless possibilities for monetising content when you can reach people in and beyond the home. “In home, for example, you can truly merge social networking and live TV, or deliver on the promise of instant product placement and purchase by interaction with the media.”
Now Ultra HD is coming and Akamai spies yet further growth, but a problem too. “UHD does require a lot more data to be sent per second. The minimum
needed for good quality is 15Mbs connectivity.” Globally, 11% of connections are at that speed, tracks Akamai, with 47 countries now qualified for 4K- readiness using this metric. “A lot of homes don't [have this connectivity] which means they will not get UHD over the internet yet,” he says. “It's not just the last mile but upstream into the carrier networks that is the challenge. Akamai has pioneered and advocated serving media from the edge of the internet. That's why we place our platform of more than 150,000 servers in more than 1,000 places around the world to deliver on the demand for video quality. “But you can't have UHD or interactive, personalised video over IP if you can't get a higher quality and affordable viewing experience at scale. That is one of the grand challenges. We
have a large number of the most intelligent people on the planet focussed on solving that problem.”
Number crunching is what Akamai does. The former MIT professor, who enjoys researching questions at the intersection of mathematics and computer science, says that math can overcome seemingly impossible barriers to scale that simply can't be done, affordably, with traditional approaches to media delivery.
“Math is a blend of art and science,” says Leighton. “There is an intellectual rigour: when you prove it you know it's true absolutely. There's also a beauty and an elegance to it. “I really didn’t have any desire to start a company. But I did have a strong interest in technology and in trying to make a difference in the world and solve problems.”
“We want to enable everyone to go home and watch an Ultra HD video over IP”
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