Fastly Launches Media Shield to Optimize High-Traffic Streaming

Fastly now powers major brands including A+E Networks, Brightcove, Dish Network, and Vimeo

SAN FRANCISCO(02 Oct 2017)

Fastly, the edge cloud platform, today announced its Media Shield. This new offering optimizes on-demand video and live streaming by acting as an origin to content delivery network (CDN) providers, sitting between a company's CDN deployments and its central cloud. Fastly customers have reported cost savings of up to 75 percent a year, along with performance and availability improvements. Fastly’s advancements have driven threefold growth of its media and streaming traffic in the past year, with brands like A+E Networks (including A&E, History, Lifetime, FYI, Viceland, LMN), Brightcove, Dish Network, and Vimeo (including Vimeo Live) using its edge cloud platform.

The over-the-top (OTT) market is forecasted to reach $64.9 billion, with 965 million connected devices capable of streaming video by 2021. Content providers face a growing demand for real-time, low latency streaming experiences across a broader range of devices. Designed to be easily added to new or existing streaming infrastructure, Fastly's Media Shield improves performance, eliminates inefficiencies, and reduces the total cost of ownership associated with multi-CDN deployments.

“A growing number of media companies are moving toward a multi-CDN strategy to improve viewer experience,” said Dan Rayburn, Principal Analyst at Frost & Sullivan. “One of the biggest challenges they face is how to route streaming traffic across multiple CDNs in a way that doesn’t duplicate efforts and multiply cost. You don’t want your origin server processing the same request for several CDNs at once. Fastly’s Media Shield offers a compelling solution to this problem.”

“Optimized streaming is crucial for business success given the current video and content landscape,” said Jon Corley, CTO at Brightcove. “We are excited to be using Fastly's Media Shield as one of the solutions that enable Brightcove to deliver the best streaming experience to users around the world and in today's online video market. We look forward to our continued relationship with the company.”

Benefits of Fastly’s Media Shield include:

• Improved Quality of Experience (QoE) - Serving more video content from Media Shield means faster video startup times and less playback interruptions, resulting in the highest quality user experience.

• Cost Reduction - Using Media Shield to process at the edge, businesses can minimize requests for video content and drastically reduce origin egress costs.

• Flexible Deployment - Media Shield can seamlessly integrate into businesses’ existing technology stacks for instant deployment and rapid ROI.

To learn more about Fastly’s Media Shield, visit: https://www.fastly.com/products/media-and-streaming.

About Fastly

Fastly helps the world’s most popular digital businesses keep pace with their customer expectations by delivering fast, secure, and scalable online experiences. Businesses trust Fastly’s edge cloud platform to accelerate the pace of technical innovation, mitigate evolving threats, and scale on demand. Founded in 2011, Fastly powers online destinations including Airbnb, GitHub, Alaska Airlines, Pinterest, Vimeo, The Guardian, The New York Times, and Ticketmaster. Learn more at Fastly.com and follow us on Twitter @fastly.