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Akamai Announces CMAF Support to Simplify Transcoding, Storage

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Content delivery network Akamai isn't waiting for the Common Media Application Format (CMAF) to be approved before supporting it. While the CMAF is now it Draft International Standard status with the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), Akamai is throwing its weight behind it. Customers using Akamai's on-demand transcoding solution, part of its Media Services on Demand OTT product, now have the option to prepare content using CMAF. This is in addition to Adobe HDS, Apple HLS, Microsoft Smooth Streaming, and MPEG-DASH options.

CMAF is being created to address problems in encoding, packaging, and storage that come from having multiple versions of every video file. Using CMAF, publishers can streamline the encoding process, using far less space for storage since they only need one version of a file for video playback on any device. CMAF includes support for encryption, multiple codecs, multi-track video and audio, and captions, which should prove useful for launching services internationally.

“While we’ve made good progress as an industry toward using HTTP/S to deliver adaptive segmented content, we continue to see fragmentation thanks to competing solutions such as HLS, Smooth, HDS, and MPEG DASH," says Shawn Michels, media product management director at Akamai. “Even though the industry seems to be consolidating on DASH and HLS, content creators must still encode and store the same audio and video twice. CMAF is designed to finally eliminate those unnecessary and costly redundancies and related delivery inefficiencies by requiring content to be encoded, packaged, and cached only once, and played back on one common player.”

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