New England Sports Network, which beat Bally Sports to market in June with the very first over-the-top regional-sports-network streaming service, is now taking its streaming into 4K and HDR display resolution.

Starting on with the Boston Bruins NHL home opener on Saturday, NESN 360 will feature the game in 4K/HDR on apps running on iPhone, Android, Apple TV, Fire TV and Google TV.

Authenticated TV Everywhere streaming of the linear NESN RSN will also be available in 4K/HDR.

Also read: Not Impressed! Reviews Mixed for NESN 360, the First Regional Sports Network To Go DTC

Major League Baseball games featuring NESN’s other major core tenant, the Boston Red Sox, will be available to sports fans in the formats starting next spring, when the Sox begin their 2023 season. 

To hoist the 4K/HDR experience, NESN did what folks from Boston often like to do — partner with another New Englander, in this case, cloud-computing company Akamai.

“This technology provides a rich, immersive experience for NESN 360 subscribers and those with access through their TV provider,” Ahmed Darwish, NESN’s chief marketing officer, said. “Fan reaction when we piloted 4K/HDR during the Red Sox season was spectacular, and we look forward to wowing Boston sports fans this Bruins season.”

Added Will Law, chief architect for Akamai’s Edge Technology Group: “NESN is proving that the technology to live stream 4K/HDR at scale and consumer demand for the content have both finally arrived.” ■

Online piracy is on the rise and the “television” category, which includes streaming services, is the biggest target.

That’s according to the latest State of the Internet (SOTI) report from Akamai, “Pirates in the Outfield,” which found that piracy was up 16% across all categories studied.

“Each day, hundreds of millions of connections to piracy websites are recorded, proving that the public’s appetite for streaming content is only growing, and their choice of access is fluid,” the report concluded.

Also: Court Fines Dish-Infringing Streamer $7M

Online security company Akamai looked at visits to piracy websites between January and September 2021 and found that demand for pirated television content — either directly via a browser or app, or via torrent downloads — totaled 3.7 billion unlicensed streams and downloads.

Most users accessed the pirate sites directly (61.5%), while only 28.6% searched for them.

Television was the top pirated industry by a wide margin, with 67 billion total site visits, followed by publishing at 30 billion, film at 14.5 billion, music at 10.8 billion and software, which includes video games, at 8.9 billion.

And the U.S. had the dubious distinction of being home to the most pirated countries at 13.5 billion visits to piracy websites, followed by Russia at 7.2 billion, India at 6.5 billion, China with 5.9 billion and Brazil rounding out the top five with 4.5 billion.

The report advises broadcasters and streaming services to help defend themselves by addressing “workflow issues and API-based problems since those are areas of exploitation for pirates, who often take multiple lines of attack.” ■

How much has live-streaming of video over the internet replaced broadcast and cable transmission on a global basis in just five years? 

A lot. 

According to Akamai, Italy’s penalty kick-fueled European Championship win over England Sunday generated peak internet traffic of 34.9 terabytes per second, almost five times as much data than the 7.26 Tbps that was streamed back in 2016, when Portugal defeated France for the Euro title. 

Overall, the 51 “2020 Euro Championship” matches (the tourney was pushed to 2021 due to the pandemic) generated an average of 17.5 Tbps, vs. an average of 4.11 Tbps for the tournament five years earlier. 

Other later round games, meanwhile, also generated huge data usage numbers--the round-of-16 game between England and Germany resulted in usage of 33.9 Tbps, for example.

Akamai said it helped customers live stream nearly 580 million hours of tournament coverage this time around vs. 164 million hours in 2016. 

After the pandemic powered increase in streaming in 2020, Akamai expects live streaming to surge in late 2020 and continue to be huge in 2021 and is updating its platform to be able to handle the climbing usage.

Akamai said that it could see 50 million people concurrently streaming a single live event in the coming months, about double the current record.

Akamai said it has created new tools to help developers set up live streaming workflows.

New Akamai Developer APIs can increase operational efficiency for organizations that need to manage numerous live or linear streams, often simultaneously,” said Alex Balford, senior product marketing manager, Media and Entertainment at Akamai, in a blog post. “These APIs are designed to simplify the process of provisioning Akamai’s Media Services Live and Adaptive Media Delivery, which are critical components of many customers’ live workflows to ingest streams with high stability and reach global audiences with as little latency as possible.”

Akamai said its Media Services Live now includes a live clipping feature to simplify the creating and archiving of highlight, while a new feature called Instant TV enables streaming providers to define the beginning of a live program and allows viewers to utilize restart TV functionality to start streaming an in-progress show from the beginning.

At the same time, Akamai is beefing up systems to combat fraudulent or shared streams, while building out capacity, The Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform now includes more than 300,000 servers in 4,00 locations and 1,500 networks around the world. 

In his blog, Balford noted that after lockdown and quarantine, stream traffic on Akamai’s platform exceeded 100 terabits per second every day in the second quarter. Traffic topped 100 terabits for the first time in October 2019.

“Many major sports leagues have recently returned, with limited or in some cases no fans in attendance, and for some the audiences tuning in have been an order of magnitude larger than before the pandemic,” Balford said. “Looking ahead, many major international sporting events such as the Olympics, UEFA Euro tournament, and others have deferred their events until late 2020 or 2021, setting up a perfect storm of sorts where many live events are set to take place in tight time windows.”

Between the U.S. election campaigns and the return of sports to TV, “Akamai has seen a significant increase in live streaming,” he said. “We expect this trend to continue.” 

The media landscape saw steady change in 2017. High Dynamic Range (HDR) moved to the forefront and consumers took advantage of even more skinny bundle offerings as they continue to look for ways to cut or shave the cord. Artificial intelligence became more accessible and had a big impact on consumer interaction.

The question is, how will the tides turn in the next 365 days? Here are my predictions for 2018:

High Dynamic Range (HDR) Becomes Ubiquitous

The rollout of HDR-capable devices and content will proceed much as the 4K rollout happened, which is to say smoothly and quickly. Stores are brimming with 4K display options this holiday season, many of which include HDR options across a good selection of reasonably priced models. By this time next year most new TVs will likely be HDR-capable with many more options available in the mid- and low-price range.

As with the 4K rollout, there is a chicken and egg problem of having a capable device along with the availability of content to playback that utilizes the new display capabilities. With 4K it was easier since existing cable, satellite and broadcast services were able to upgrade and provide 4K content and channels.  

With HDR it’s a bit different. Since HDR is not backward-compatible with Standard Dynamic Range TVs and most traditional broadcast infrastructure is not compatible with HDR signals, most of the HDR content will be coming from online video services such as Netflix and Amazon.  There are broadcasters out there experimenting with HDR for sure, but the time horizon for having a wide selection of HDR television and sports events available through standard TV services is still a ways out. Meanwhile, subscribers to Amazon Prime Video or Netflix can enjoy a reasonable selection of HDR titles today, and most new titles from these two services are coming in HDR.

While there is still an issue of the competing Dolby Vision vs. HDR10 vs. HLG HDR formats, this won’t really matter for the average consumer. The fight is mainly between Dolby Vision and HDR10. And, with the exception of Samsung, most TV makers are beginning to support both formats and most content creators already support both. So, while Dolby and HDR10 duke it out in the format wars, most consumers will be able to continue viewing content regardless of their video service.

Skinny Bundles Abound

2018 will be the year of the skinny bundle. There are many options now available from different providers such as SlingTV, DirecTV Now, Spectrum TV Stream, YouTube TV and Hulu Live. There will be lots of hype and significant growth due to the fact that there are few skinny bundle subscribers today and it will be a compelling offer for many. For others, subscriptions even come free with mobile phone services.

What remains to be worked out is why the skinny bundle is better. At the moment, it remains simply a port of the traditional TV experience to the internet.

There is nothing significantly better than traditional TV services, except for price. Price is an important factor for sure, but price alone will not significantly disrupt the traditional TV market, especially not with the limited number of channels and on-demand assets that the skinny bundles have today.

The key thing to watch for in 2018 with regard to skinny bundles is for those companies experimenting with new and unique user experiences that take advantage of the fact that they are being offered over the internet. Some of these experiments will work, some will not; but ultimately the widespread adoption and success of the online TV offering and its ability to disrupt traditional TV is going to be based on some innovation in user experience versus simply having a cheaper option to the same experience online.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will enable better content experiences

In the last few years, but especially in 2017, artificial intelligence has advanced significantly. There are now tools available from providers such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services that no longer require an expert in artificial intelligence to set up for use. Furthermore, these providers are offering pre-built networks to process media files such as pictures and videos.

As an example, most major online photo storage and sharing services are using artificial intelligence to perform facial recognition in order to allow users to navigate photo collections by people versus simply by date. Many of today's online video services rely on metadata in order to categorize, recommend and search the content catalog. However, the sources and depth of this metadata is rather thin, being constrained to a few items such as title, director, genre, actor etc. Even that is only for the relatively small set of content that is professionally produced in comparison to the vast volumes of user-generated and semi-professional content being created in the world. The kind and amount of metadata available for that content varies widely and often doesn't exist.

Artificial intelligence can quickly and easily process vast volumes of data that not even an army of humans could manage in a reasonable timeframe, providing the kind of metadata required for categorization, recommendation and search. This information could also be used to help further target advertising beyond simple demographics and allow for advertisers to include information about the video into which the advertisement will be placed to drive selection. Knowing what kind of content the user is watching could be as valuable as knowing the gender and age of the person watching.

The consumer-facing impact of artificial intelligence on media will be in the form of new and better user experiences around search and discovery of content, better recommendations and more relevant advertising. Knowing that this improvement was driven by artificial intelligence is something that may or may not be known depending on whether the provider reveals the implementation behind their experience.

--Bill Wishon is senior architect, media office of the CTO, at Akamai

 [Image source: Wikimedia Commons]

The U.S. broke into the global top ten with respect to average internet connection speeds in Q1, according to Akamai’s latest State of the Internet report.

The U.S. averaged 18.7 Mbps, putting it at No. 10 globally, up 22% year-on-year, and up 8.8% versus the previous quarter. In Akamai's report for Q4 2016, the U.S. averaged 17.2 Mbps, good for 14th at the time.

South Korea had the highest average connection speed in Q1, at 28.6 Mbps, followed by Norway (23.5 Mbps), Sweden (22.5 Mbps), Hong Kong (21.9 Mbps) and Switzerland (21.7 Mbps).

The global average for Q1 clocked in at 7.2 Mbps, up 15% year-on-year and 2.3% quarter-on-quarter.

Global average peak speeds hit 44.6 Mbps in Q1, up 28% YoY. Akamai said Singapore clocked in with the best average peak speed (184.5 Mbps), followed by Macao (132 Mbps), Mongolia (131.1 Mbps) Hong Kong (129.5 mbps) and South Korea 121 Mbps.

The U.S. was 16th in the peak average speed category, at 86.5 Mbps, up 28% versus the year-ago period.

Global adoption of speeds of at least 25 Mbps rose 42% to 12%. South Korea led with 40% adoption of 25 Mbps or more.

The U.S. was 10th, with 21% adoption of 25 Mbps-plus connections, up 65% YoY. Washington, D.C., held on to the top spot in the U.S. with 38% adoption in the category.

Notably, 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up are currently the speeds required to quality as “broadband,” in the eyes of the FCC.

On the mobile side, 32 countries/regions had an average mobile connection speed at or exceeding 10 Mbps, up from 30 in the previous quarter, Akamai said.

The U.S. averaged 10.7 Mbps for mobile, tops in its region, well down from the 26 Mbps average mobile connection speed seen in the U.K.

Live online video streaming traffic of today’s Inauguration of President Donald Trump has reached 7.9 Tbps, content delivery network giant Akamai announced Friday at about 12:17 p.m. ET. 

Update (12:38 p.m. ET): Peak traffic has climbed to 8.7 Tbps, Akamai said. 

Update (4:37 p.m. ET):Akamai said it also supported 4.6 million concurrent viewers of the Inauguration during the peak period on behalf of its OTT video customers.  Friday’s live traffic tied to the Inauguration also exceeded the political-facing record of 7.5 Tbps set during Election Day coverage the night of Nov. 8, 2016, the company said. That also compares to the 7.3 Tbps peak achieved during the 2016 Euro soccer tournament, and the 4.5 Tbps high-water mark achieved during the women’s team gymnastic finals at the Summer Games in Rio. 

Illustrating how far the adoption and reach of OTT has come in eight years, live online video streaming traffic from the 2009 Inauguration of President Barack Obama peaked at 1.1 Tbps, Akamai said.

Update (1:41 p.m. ET): According to Fastly, a self-styled “real time” CDN, domestic media saw an immediate 80% spike at 12:01 p.m. ET, when Trump’s Inauguration speech began. That also marked a 232% surge in domestic media traffic overall versus a week ago.  International media also saw a big bump – a 89% rise when Trump was sworn in, and a 217% overall increase compared to a year ago. 

Average Internet connection speeds and average peak speeds rose globally as well as in the U.S. in Q3, according to Akamai’s latest State of the Internet Report.

Global average connections speeds hit 6.3 Mbps, up 2.3 % versus Q2 and up 21% on a year-over-year basis. South Korea led with an average of 26.3 Mbps, followed by Hong Kong (20.1 Mbps) and Norway (20 Mbps). The U.S. was 12th, with an average of 16.3 Mbps, up 6.8% QoQ, and 30% YoY.

Global average peak connections speeds reached 37.2 Mbps, up 3.4% QoQ, and 16%, YoY, according to Akamai. Singapore was tops, with a peak average of 162 Mbps, followed by Hong Kong (116.2 Mbps) and South Korea (114.2). The U.S., ranked 20th, averages 70.8 Mbps, up 1.6% QoQ and 23% YoY.

Akamai also found that the global adoption rate for 10 Mbps broadband rose 5.4% QoQ, while adoption of 15 Mbps and 25 Mbps increased 6.5% and 5.3%, respectively.

Average mobile connection speeds ranged from a high of 23.7 Mbps in the United Kingdom to a low of 2.2 Mbps in Venezuela. The U.S. mobile connection speed average clocked in at 7.5 Mbps. 

Live video streaming traffic tied to Tuesday’s U.S. Presidential Election set a record for a single news event on Akamai's platform, the content delivery network company said.

Akamai said live video streaming traffic specific to the election peaked at 7.5 Tbps on its platform shortly before midnight ET on Tuesday.

By way of comparison, Akamai noted that Election Day traffic on Akamai in 2004 peaked at just 21 Gbps, and hit 1.1 Tbps during the 2009 Obama inauguration, and 1.3 Tbps for the Royal Wedding in 2011.

Of more recent note, first 2016 Presidential debate peaked at 4.4 Tbps in September, the company said.

Akamai also estimated a streaming audience size during last night’s election of 3.35 million, up from 1.8 million during the first 2016 Presidential debate on Sept. 26.

"Not only are more people watching online in general, they're watching at higher quality, which contributes to the increasingly higher peaks in traffic that we're observing,” Bill Wheaton, EVP and GM of media at Akamai, said in a statement, pointing out that 2016 has already been a record-setter for streaming thanks to the European soccer finals and the Summer Games in Rio.

It seems like only yesterday that we said “goodbye” to the U.S. political conventions. During the dog days of summer, we had a chance to reflect on what makes live-streaming them so challenging. And as the delivery partner for a lot of broadcasters, with the third presidential debate and Election Day just around the corner, we wanted to offer some hard-won wisdom for others embarking on high-profile live events.

Managing partner-splitters: In politics, people who vote Republican for one race and Democratic for another are called “ticket splitters.” In video production, think of them as programmers who cross partner lines to work with separate vendors for encoding, CDN and network. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. It can enable you to work with best-of-breed partners for each phase of workflow and delivery. But it’s not without opportunities for error.

Change you can believe in: For example, many broadcasters have policies in place that prevent changes during primetime or drive time. Believe it or not, that’s not always the case when it comes to live-event time. Actions on parts of your platform — or a vendor’s — that seem totally unrelated to the live event can wreak havoc on the event itself.

For example, a network-wide virus scan can compromise egress bandwidth. This seemingly internal spike in consumption can ripple down to external viewers. Suddenly, the pipe you thought was dedicated from encoder to CDN partner entry point looks a lot less dedicated.

We’ve found three best practices that can help: transparency, telemetry and talking.

The promise of radical transparency: In the months and weeks leading up to a major live event, adopt a default policy of “communicate and share” even at the risk of over-communicating. Ask questions of and offer answers to your vendors. “What does your upstream architecture look like? Where do your firewalls or DMZs live? Walk me through your network tiers. Where does media traffic live, or not?”

Your questions are designed to get at the “itch” spots — the parts of the architecture that are most likely to get rubbed, and fail.

Good telemetry trumps blame: Political conventions are often about blaming the other guy for today’s challenges. In live-event video delivery, there can also be plenty of finger-pointing as well, especially in the multivendor setups we typically see.

Instead of playing the blame game, use good telemetry to isolate problems at their source. For example, set beacons throughout your workflow and tie them to your broadcast operations control center (BOCC). Then, set regular trace route tests to check for latency. Look at the timing of egress from ingest to CDN, for example. If the latency spikes above that threshold or shows a lot of variance, that should trigger an alert that leads to a proactive call from your workflow monitor.

By eliminating the finger-pointing phase, mean time to notify and mitigate should drop significantly. You can do the same with ingest errors by regularly polling entry points. Imagine if potholes could be filled that fast!

Know your moves — communication and operational awareness: Heading into any large live event, there should be a clear picture between the content provider and the CDN of what the contingencies will be used in the event of quality degradation. What are the primary and backup paths for first mile? Do you have backup streams/workflows configured to switch to in the event of unforeseen failures? What are the targeted regions for viewers, and which ISPs will be serving the last mile? What is the security policy for the content, and who is entitled to receive it? What device platforms are important for the event (e.g., Apple, Roku, etc.)?

It’s important to set expectations and be prepared for the order of magnitude of concurrent users — both from a network capacity and tooling perspective, which will ensure proper throughput, alerting and data aggregation as we can now monitor content and traffic in near real time.

Communication continues to be key during the event. For example, establish a live audio bridge between customer and CDN to facilitate any changes in production that may impact the streaming content. Check all available bitrates and latency for primary and backup feeds. Just prior to the start of the event you should know how your content is being mapped at entry point, and periodically checking throughout can give the customer and CDN a level of assuredness as they are executing properly on a key event. Calling out that status on a live bridge is good operational hygiene. It is a good way to stay synchronized. Call and response protocol on an agreed upon cadence is a simple concept but not always applied in this stage of the content supply chain. We believe this should be the norm.

In order to win the viewer’s vote on where they go to get their OTT content, the quality must be there. We know from analytics that when rebuffering spikes or bit rates drop and picture quality is poor, people will leave the stream and go somewhere else. Therefore, it is imperative to provide proactive, real-time monitoring, communication and quality metrics, while ensuring broad interoperability across a fully managed end-to-end, multivendor ecosystem.

Matt Azzarto is director of media operations and Sean Keats is director of industry marketing at Cambridge, Mass.-based content delivery network and cloud services provider Akamai.

Apple’s June 15th announcement at its Worldwide Developers Conference that it will add fragmented MP4 (fMP4) support to HLS marks a significant step in simplifying online video streaming.

fMP4 is the parent of the emerging Common Media Application Format (CMAF), and Apple’s plan to support fMP4 brings the industry closer to the single format for OTT distributors and playback support on all consumer electronics devices. The ultimate goal is to reduce the complexity when delivering video on-line.

The OTT industry has made a wholesale shift over the past five years from using proprietary media protocols such as RTMP, MMS and RTP, towards using HTTP/S to deliver adaptive segmented content to viewers. Within the adaptive segmented formats, there is still significant fragmentation, with HLS, Smooth, HDS and MPEG DASH offering competing solutions. Even with the expected deprecation of Smooth and HDS and their replacement with DASH, most content distributors are still faced with making two silos of content – one in HLS and another in DASH.

Today, HLS specifies the use of TS (transport stream) file containers, while DASH, although allowing TS, almost uniformly uses ISO Base Media File Format (ISOBMFF) in practice, in particular a variant known as the aforementioned fragmented mp4. The result is that content distributors wanting to reach a HLS and DASH audience must encode and store the same audio and video data twice – once wrapped in TS containers and then again wrapped in ISOBMFF. These same files, although representing the same content, cost twice as much to package, twice as much to store on origin and compete with each other on Akamai edge caches for space, thereby reducing the efficiency with which they can be delivered.

To try to overcome the cache efficiency problem, the market has launched a myriad of solutions which require complex synthesis of the TS and ISO segments (for HDS) at the edge or in a streaming mid-tier. These servers, which have to build content before they can deliver it, have a lower throughput than those that can simply pass it through. File container diversity therefore limits the total throughput achievable by a delivery server, as well as contributing significantly to our customer’s content preparation, workflow management, and delivery costs.  Alternatively, customers could store multiple versions of the content which impact total storage costs.

In mid-2015 two unlikely collaborators -- Microsoft and Apple -- came together to plan an end to this inefficiency through a new media file format, which at the time was called Common Media File Format but which is now CMAF. Microsoft and Apple reached out to Akamai and a number of their closer partners to iterate on the proposal. In February 2016 this group of companies prepared a joint submission to MPEG, which has been accepted onto a standardization track.

CMAF has a number of attributes that are of interest to the media industry:

-It is an ISOBMFF, fMP4 container, specifically ISO/IEC 14496-12:201. Transport Streams have served the purpose of the broadcast and cable industries well in delivering continuous streams of data, but they are ill-suited to segmented media delivery and switching, incurring higher overhead/payload ratios than fmp4. fmp4 is extensible for future additions, lightweight, already used by DASH, Smooth and HDS and is an ISO standard with a robust toolset around it for encoding, manipulation, debugging and analysis.

-Common Encryption (CENC) - ISO/IEC 23001-7: 2016 – a standard means of encrypting media content payload using AES-128bit encryption and then supplying header information so that multiple concurrent DRM systems can be used to decrypt the content. This prevents separate silos of content being needed to support the myriad of DRM solutions available today which, unfortunately, are not converging at the same rate as the file containers.

-Will support the MPEG codec suite of AVC (ISO/IEC 14496-10), AAC (ISO/IEC 14496-3) and HEVC (ISO/IEC 23008-2) codecs in a baseline interoperability but allow other codecs (such as VP9 or multichannel audio) to be signaled.

-Currently allows two types of captioning/subtitling formats – WebVTT (http://www.w3.org/TR/webvtt1) and IMSC-1 (http://www.w3.org/TR/ttml-imsc1).

-Segments must begin with keyframes and there must be precise segment alignment across bitrates. This simplifies switching between bitrates for players.

-Requires independent (non-muxed) audio and video segments.

-A low latency mode is offered, which should further help reduce OTT live stream latencies below the thresholds for terrestrial and satellite broadcast distribution.

-Is designed to be referenced by both a HLS playlist (.m3u8) and a DASH manifest (.mpd).

CMAF is very similar to the file container that DASH already uses today, so adopting CMAF from the DASH perspective requires little, if any, change to encoders, workflow or players. For the Apple and HLS community however, it requires parsing a new type of container. Apple’s announcement to support fMP4 in HLS under iOS10, macOS and tvOS gives the industry more confidence that CMAF will live up to its billing as the driver of convergence.

The advent of CMAF heralds the beginning of the end for TS containers for OTT delivery. The benefits of encoding once, packaging once, caching once and building a single type of player are too attractive along the delivery chain for TS to persist in the long term.

It is not all ice-cream cake however. Even though Apple, Android and Microsoft operating systems and devices will quickly support CMAF, there will still be many legacy devices that are non field-upgradeable for which TS-based HLS will continue to be needed.

Additionally, Common Encryption is not as common as one might think. There are actually several cipher block modes allowed by the spec – CTR versus CBC. While draft CMAF continues to support both of these, the vision of a single content set for all devices remains blurry. CMAF also does not solve the problem of manifest fragmentation, as both HLS m3u8 manifests and DASH .mpd manifests will still need to be generated.

Despite these issues, CMAF remains the biggest step forward the industry has taken in many years towards a harmonized and converged future. We can expect market forces to pick winners (for codecs, captions, encryption modes and presentations formats) and CMAF to settle quickly to be the de-facto OTT media standard.

Akamai has been committed to CMAF from its instantiation and is actively working to ensure CMAF support is a first-class citizen of both our Media Services On Demand and Media Services Live products.

Want more information on CMAF?

-Attend the public Ad Hoc meeting August 25 and 26 in New York City hosted by MLB Advanced Media.

Will Law is Chief Architect, Media Division, at Akamai, a top provider of content delivery network services.

Though the U.S. still trails many other nations with respect to average broadband speeds, those connections are getting faster, according to Akamai’s State of the Internet Report for Q4 2015.

Per Akamai, U.S. average connection speeds in Q4 reached 14.2 Mbps, up 29% year-over-year, while average peak connections speeds hit 61.5 Mbps, up 25%. On a global basis, that put the U.S. at number 14 with respect to average connection speeds, and number 20 for average peak connection speeds.

Global average connection speeds in Q4 clocked in at 5.6 Mbps, up 8.6% from the previous quarter, and up 23% year-over-year. South Korea (26.7 Mbps) was tops among individual countries, followed by Sweden (19.1 Mbps), Norway (18.8 Mbps), and Japan (17.4 Mbps).

Global average peak connections speeds hit 32.5 Mbps in Q4, up 21% year-over-year, Akamai said. In this category, Singapore (135.7 Mbps) led the way, followed by Hong Kong (105.2 Mbps), South Korea (95.3 Mbps), Macao (83.1 Mbps) and Japan (82.9 Mbps).

On a global basis, 7.1% of unique IP addresses connected to Akamai averaged connection speeds of at least 25 Mbps, marking a 74% year-on-year increase. The FCC currently defines broadband as connections that provide at least 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up stream.

South Korea led all countries with 25 Mbps adoption, at 37%, followed by Sweden (23%), Norway (21%), Latvia (18%) and Japan (17%). The U.S. did not fall into the top 10 in this category, according to Akamai.

However, Washington, D.C. (Akamai counts it as a state in its quarterly reports), led the way with 25 Mbps adoption (25%), followed by Delaware (22%), Rhode Island (19%), Massachusetts (18%), Maryland (17%), Utah, New Jersey and Virginia (16%), Washington (15%) and Pennsylvania (14%).

Washington, D.C. led the U.S. with an average connection speed of 21.3 Mbps; Delaware topped all states with an average peak connection speed of 88.3 Mbps. 

YipTV said has hooked into with Akamai’s cloud-based platform to deliver an OTT service that features more than 100 "channels," including 18 live TV streams.

Launched in May 2015, YipTV’s no-contract, $14.99 per month service focused on Spanish-language video services is offered on several platforms, including iOS and Android mobile devices, select smart TVs, Web browsers, Apple TV boxes and via the Google Chromecast streaming adapter.

YipTV CIO Giancarlo Paolillo said Akamai’s platform has enabled the OTT service to reduce lag time by acquiring digital signals of the live TV channels it offers close to their origination points while also tapping into analytics that help YipTV monitor audience behaviors and keep video quality in check.

“Subscribers today expect a flawless viewing experience and instant access to high-definition video content on any screen,” said John Bishop, CTO, media, at Akamai, in a statement.  “Delivering OTT video and other content must be seamless, fast and scalable.  Our Media Delivery Solutions are designed to help services like YipTV engage their subscribers by delivering content at the highest possible quality wherever and whenever users want and, further, to scale with the growth and complexity of different types of connected devices.”

Global broadband speeds experienced some ups and downs in Q3 as average connection speeds rose versus the previous period along with a small decline in average peak speeds, according to Akamai’s latest State of the Internet Report.

Akamai also found that 15% of the world is “4K ready,” the classification Akamai assigns to broadband connections that pump out at least 15 Mbps. That 4K-readiness figure, which is becoming more important as Netflix, Amazon and MVPDs look to expand their 4K streaming libraries, is up from 5.3% in Q3 2014, according to Akamai.

In Q3, global average connection speeds rose 14% year-over-year, to 5.1 Mbps, but only rose 0.2% versus the previous quarter.

South Korea (20.5 Mbps) was tops in that category, though down 19% year-on-year. Rounding out the global top 10 for average connections speeds were: Sweden (17.4Mbps); Norway (16.4 Mbps); Switzerland (16.2 Mbps); Hong Kong (15.8 Mbps); Netherlands (15.6 Mbps); Japan (15 Mbps); Finland (14.8 Mbps); Latvia (14.5 Mbps) and Czech Republic (14.5 Mbps). The United States, which placed 16th globally, produced a 12.6 Mbps average, up 9.4% from the year-ago quarter, and up 7.3% versus Q2 2015.

With respect to average peak connection speeds, the world averaged 32.2 Mbps in Q3 2015s, down 0.9% versus Q2 2015, but rose 30% year-over-year.

Singapore, with a peak average of 135.4 Mbps, led the way, followed by Hong Kong (101.1 Mbps); South Korea (86.6 Mbps); Japan (78.4 Mbps); Taiwan (77.9 Mbps); Qatar (75.2 Mbps); Macao (73.7 Mbps); Romania (72.9 Mbps); Israel (70 Mbps); and Sweden (69 Mbps). The U.S. was 21st globally, with a peak average in Q3 2015 of 57.3 Mbps, up 18% year-over-year, and up 14% quarter over quarter.

Akamai also tracks adoption by speed levels, including 25 Mbps, the FCC’s current downstream benchmark for what's considered “broadband.”

Globally, 5.2% of unique IP addresses connected to Akamai at average connection speeds of at least 25 Mbps, up 6.3% versus the previous quarter, led by South Korea (24%), Sweden (19%) and Norway (16%).

The U.S. was not in the top 10 in the 25 Mbps category, but Washington,  D.C., was tops in the nation, with 22% of connections providing average speeds of at least 25 Mbps in Q3 2015, followed by Delaware (17%), Utah (14%) and Massachusetts (13%.)

Akamai also continued to track adoption of IPv6, a more massive IP addressing scheme that enters play as the pool of IPv4 addresses runs dry and amid the growth of the so-called Internet of Things.

If you don’t have an IPv6 strategy that’s already in place or at least well downstream, you’re in big trouble.

The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) announced Thursday that the free pool for IPv4 addresses has reached “zero” following the issuance of its final addresses.

ARIN, president and CEO John Curran said in a blog post, will “continue to process and approve requests for IPv4 address blocks, and approved requests can be filled out via the Wait List for Unmet IPv4 Requests or via the IPv4 Transfer Market.

“Effective today, because exhaustion of the ARIN IPv4 free pool has occurred for the first time, there is no longer a restriction on how often organizations may request transfers to specified recipients,” Curran noted. “If we are able to fully satisfy all of the requests on the waiting list, any remaining IPv4 addresses would be placed into the ARIN free pool of IPv4 addresses to satisfy future requests.”

Many U.S. network operators have been preparing for this day by transitioning to IPv6 and its virtually unlimited supply of addresses. ARIN has been issuing warnings about IPv4 depletion for years. 

According to Akamai’s just-released Q2 2015 State of the Internet report, cable and wireless/mobile providers drove the largest volumes of IPv6 requests – Verizon Wireless (71%); T-Mobile (44%), Comcast (37%), AT&T (35%) and Time Warner Cable (18%). On a global basis, Belgium’s IPv6 request volume to Akamai led with 38%, followed by Switzerland (23%), the U.S. (19%), Peru and Germany (17%), and Luxembourg (14%).

For its part, Comcast announced in July 2014 that its broadband network has been fully deployed to support IPv6 dual stack connectivity, a milestone that factored in as the pool of IPv4 addresses inched toward depletion.

John Brzozowski, fellow and chief IPv6 architect at Comcast Cable, blogged today that the ARIN announcement is “not the beginning of the end” but “just the end of the beginning.”

“The news comes as no surprise, but it will force companies and organizations worldwide to accelerate their transition to the more robust, secure and modern version of the Internet protocol, IPv6,” he wrote.

Regarding Comcast’s IPv6-facing work, he noted that the MSO now has “tens of millions” of cable modems being managed using IPv6-only lltoday, and that less than 5% of cable modems on Comcast’s network now rely on IPv4. Cable's widely deployed DOCSIS 3.0 platform supports IPv6. 

Additionally, more than 70% of Comcast broadband subs (residential and commercial0 are actively provisioned with IPv6 support today, and that “well over 15 percent of Comcast’s Internet traffic is over IPv6.”

All of Comcast’s products and services are geared for or will soon be geared for IPv6. For example, X1, Comcast’s next-gen, IP-capable video platform, is migrating to IPv6, he said. 

RELATED:Sling TV Struggles During 'Fear the Walking Dead'

Live-TV streaming over broadband is a small-but-growing phenomenon, and the Internet is ill-prepared for the giant wave of data about to sweep over it in the years ahead. At least that’s the view of Akamai, a top content delivery network (CDN) provider that works with a wide range of programmers and distributors.

Despite the emergence of services such as Sling TV, PlayStation Vue and CBS All Access, live linear television “hasn’t moved online yet in a big way” and remains largely the domain of on-demand and episodic TV fare, Bill Wheaton, vice president and general manager of media at Akamai, said.

But digital content rights continue to loosen, paving the way for more OTT services. While the content end of the spectrum appears to be turning the OTT corner, the question remains whether consumers will show up.

“We think they will, and that’s what we’re betting on,” Wheaton said.

Here’s how it looks today: Akamai says a typical consumer watching OTT video via its platform accounts for 10 Megabits per second or more of traffic. When extended to 5 million users — the equivalent of about four Nielsen ratings points — that represents about 50 Terabits per second of sustained demand. That’s more than Akamai delivers today for all of its customers combined.

And it’s not just about linear TV. Apps such as HBO Go and HBO Now (HBO’s new standalone OTT service) tend to see spikes on Sunday nights when the network debuts new episodes of its most popular originals.

“Even though it’s a VOD file, it behaves like a live show because people go in and watch it at the same time,” Wheaton said. “It’s not inconceivable that in four to five years, the majority of television is actually watched over an IP-delivered network.”

In Akamai’s view, the Internet must shift to a different protocol for OTT video in order to carry the load. While most OTT video today uses Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), Akamai is proposing a move to User Datagram Protocol (UDP), an alternative system that’s known for low latency.

“We’re starting to rethink and reinvent how video is delivered, fundamentally,” Wheaton said. Most “walled-garden” IPTV services already lean on UDP. “We think [UDP] is the right way to deliver video in the long run.”

While TCP has been used in tandem with adaptive bit rate apps that ratchet the resolution and bit rate up and down based on available bandwidth, it’s not as handy when trying to deliver HD video.

UDP, by comparison, is equipped to use multicast, a more-efficient system that, unlike unicast, can deliver a stream to a group of subscribers. It also provides quicker startup times and cuts down on buffering delays.

Wheaton estimated UDP, on average, is 30% to 40% more efficient than TCP, and makes OTT streams behave “more like television.”

Akamai has been developing UDP capabilities in house, but boosted its expertise in the area in April when it acquired Octoshape, a cloud-based OTT IP video-service provider.

Wheaton said Akamai is bullish on UDP but acknowledges it will need significant buy-in. While Google has deployed its QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connection) protocol on Chrome browsers, that still leaves out other browsers, mobile devices, streaming players and smart TVs. So in addition to supporting UDP on servers, Akamai is faced with having to push it to to billions of consumer devices.

Akamai has rolled out a UDP software development kit that supports Linux, iOS, Android and Windows, and the company is working to get the technology integrated at the chip and connected-device level.

“We’re moving the edge further out to the edge,” Wheaton said, hopeful that Akamai can use a mixed-mode methodology during the anticipated transition.

Average broadband speeds in the U.S. reached 11.9 Mbps in the first quarter of 2015, a 13% year-on-year increase (and 7.4% on a quarter-over-quarter basis), according to Akamai’s latest State of the Internet Report.

Despite that healthy jump, that placed the U.S. in 19th among other countries. South Korea led all nations with an average of 23.6 Mbps, followed by Ireland (17.4 Mbps); Hong Kong (16.7 Mbps); Sweden (15.8 Mbps); Netherlands (15.3 Mbps); Japan (15.2 Mbps); Switzerland (14.9%), Norway (14.1 Mbps); Latvia (13.8 Mbps) and Finland (13.7 Mbps).

On a global basis, average connection speeds rose 10%, to 5 Mbps.

When it came to average peak connection speed, Akamai said the U.S. came in at 53.3 Mbps, up 31% year-over-year and 7.9% quarter-over-quarter, ranking it 22nd. In that category, Singapore led with a peak average of 98.5 Mbps, followed by Hong Kong (92.6 Mbps); South Korea (79 Mbps); Kuwait (76.5 Mbps); and Romania (71.6 Mbps).

Starting with this report, Akamai started to track Internet adoption of 25 Mbps, fitting the FCC’s new benchmark definition of broadband: 25 Mbps down by 3 Mbps upstream.

In the U.S. Washington, D.C., was tops, with 18% of its unique IP addresses connecting to Akamai at average speeds of at least 25 Mbps, followed by Delaware (15%).

“Adoption rates for 25 Mbps broadband are still fairly low nationwide, with 46 states seeing levels below 10%,” Akamai’s report said, noting that Ohio ranked last among U.S. states, with its 1.4% adoption rate. Hawaii, Kentucky, and Alaska all had adoption rates below 2% in the first quarter as well. Seventeen states had adoption levels below 5%.

Among other countries, adoption of 25 Mbps speeds or greater reached 31% in South Korea, followed by Hong Kong (17%); Sweden (15%); and Japan (13%), according to Akamai.

Global average Internet speeds were relatively unchanged in the fourth quarter of 2014, rising just 0.7%, to 4.5 Mbps, according to Akamai’s latest State of the Internet Report.  

The world fared better with respect to average peak connection speeds, which jumped 8.4%, to 29.9 Mbps, from the year-ago quarter, Akamai said.

South Korea held crown with an average connection speed of 22.2 Mbps, up 1.6% year-on-year, followed by Hong Kong (16.8 Mbps), Japan (15.2 Mbps), Sweden (14.6%). 

U.S. speeds averaged 11.1 Mbps in the fourth quarter of 2014, up 15% from the year-ago quarter, putting it in 16th place worldwide. Canada averaged 10.7 Mbps, for a global ranking of 20th.

With respect to global average peak connection speeds, Hong Kong was tops, with 87.7 Mbps, up 29% year-on-year, ahead of Singapore (84 Mbps), South Korea (75.4 Mbps), and Japan (59 Mbps). The U.S. ranked 22th on the list, with an average peak connection speed of 49.4 Mbps, while Canada ranked 27th, with a 46.3 Mbps average peak connection speed.

Broadband speeds have again become a regulatory focus in the U.S. following the FCC’s vote in January to raise the definition of “broadband” from 4 Mbps down by 1 Mbps upstream, to 25 Mbps/3 Mbps.

Using 4 Mbps as the benchmark, broadband adoption was highest in Bulgaria (96%), edging out South Korea (95%), Switzerland (93%), Israel and Denmark (92%), and the Netherlands and Hong Kong (91%).  On that same scale, Canada (85%) was ranked 18th, and the U.S. (74%) was ranked 40th.

The report also took another stab at global “4K readiness,” which Akamai defines as 15 Mbps or more  using content that is encoded with H.264/MPEG4-AVC as the baseline. Akamai acknowledges that the bit rate threshold for 4K streaming will come down with the help of more efficient codecs such as HEVC and VP9.

About 12% of unique IP addresses connecting to Akamai globally in Q4 2014 had an average connection speed of 15 Mbps or more, up just 0.6% from Q3. Roughly 18% of U.S. connections were considered 4K-ready in Q4, up 39% from a year ago, compared to 16% in Canada, up 78%.

When viewed through Akamai’s lens, Delaware was the most 4K-ready state, with 38% of connections providing 15 Mbps or more, followed by Rhode Island and Massachusetts (30% each), Virginia (28%), Washington, D.C.,  and Washington state (27% each). 

NBC's coverage of Super Bowl XLIX wasn't the only platform to set records on Sunday.

NBC Sports Live Extra’s live stream of the New England Patriot's 28-24 win over the Seattle Seahawks in the NFL championship game averaged 800,000 viewers per minute, 1.3 million concurrent users and 213 total minutes, according to Adobe Analytics.

The live stream to desktops and tablets -- Verizon holds NFL mobile streaming rights -- also produced 2.5 million uniques, up 9% from Fox's tally last year and 19% compared to the 2.1 million for NBC’s live stream of Super Bowl XLVI in 2012, which was the first-ever live stream of the NFL's title tilt.

The 800,000 average viewers per minute was up 52% versus Fox’s stream of Super Bowl XLVIII last year, which averaged a then record 528,000 viewers per minute. Concurrent users peaked at 1.3 million at the moment when Patriots cornerback Malcolm Butler made his game-winning interception in the final seconds, and was up 18% versus Fox's 1.1 million last year.

In addition to the record traffic, NBC Sports Live Extra delivered a high-quality stream with a long engagement of 84.2 minute per viewer, according to Akamai.

“The Super Bowl stream on the NBC Sports Live Extra platform went fantastically well,” said Rick Cordella, senior vice president and general manager of digital media at NBC Sports Group. “We were excited, not only by the record-breaking consumption, but also the quality of the streams we delivered to football fans.”

4K streaming services remain in short supply, but the number of homes around the globe that can support those streams are on the rise, according to Akamai’s latest quarterly State of the Internet Report.

Noting that adaptive bit rate 4K streaming generally requires about 15 Mbps of sustained connectivity, Akamai found in its report (for the third quarter of 2014) that 12% of connections to Akamai around the world were considered “4K-ready.” Year-over-year, global 4K-readiness climbed 32%, Akamai said.

Akamai found that South Korea was most prepared for 4K streaming, with two-thirds (66%) of its connections to Akamai at or above 15 Mbps, followed by Hong Kong (37%), Japan (33%), Switzerland (30%), Netherlands (29%), Latvia (29%), Sweden (29%), Norway (21%), Singapore (21%), and Belgium (21%).

In the Americas, 19% of Akamai connections in the U.S. were delivering 15 Mbps during the period tested, down 2.3% quarter-over-quarter, and 14% in Canada, down 15%. In Akamai’s report for the first quarter of 2014, about 17% of the U.S. was prepared to deliver 4K via broadband, versus 13% for Canada.

Viewed through Akamai’s lens, Delaware was the most 4K-ready U.S. state, with 39% of connections offering 15 Mbps or more, followed by Connecticut (31%), Massachusetts (29%), Washington (27%) and Washington, D.C., New Jersey and Rhode Island (26%).

Akamai’s reports continue to focus on 4K streaming as new services emerge. Among U.S. MVPDs, DirecTV and Comcast have introduced relatively small 4K streaming offerings. Dish Network outlined its initial 4K plans at last week’s International CES, noting that its new 4K Joey will be capable of streaming in 4K but will initially obtain 4K content via satellite for playback on the new device, which will support HEVC and HDMI 2.0. Netflix and M-GO have also launched 4K streaming offerings, with M-GO unveiling a 4K download service last week.

Overall, global average connection speeds for Q3 2014 dropped 2.8%, to 4.5 Mbps, but remained above 4 Mbps for the second consecutive quarter, Akamai said

South Korea topped all countries in that category, with an average speed of 25.3 Mbps, followed by Hong Kong (16.3 Mbps), Japan (15 Mbps), Switzerland (14.5 Mbps), Sweden (14.1 Mbps), Netherlands (14 Mbps), Ireland (13.9 Mbps), Latvia (13.4 Mbps), Czech Republic (12.3 Mbps); and Singapore (12.2 Mbps).  Those levels were high enough to keep the U.S. (11.5 Mbps) and Canada (10.3 Mbps) out of the top ten.

Among individual U.S. states, Delaware had the highest average connection speed (17.4 Mbps), up 37% from the year-ago quarter, trailed by Washington (16.3 Mbps), Connecticut (15.3 Mbps), Utah (14.8 Mbps), Washington, DC (14.6 Mbps), Virginia (14.5 Mbps), Massachusetts (14.4 Mbps), Rhode Island (13.5 Mbps), Michigan (12.7 Mbps) and New Jersey (12.5 Mbps).