Reliacast and Akamai Join Forces to Measure Streams

Reliacast (www.reliacast.com), a provider of audience management solutions for digital content and Akamai ( www.akamai.com), a provider of content delivery services, have teamed up to offer digital content delivery through audience management. BizNews24, an Akamai reseller for on-demand and live streaming events is a joint customer of Reliacast and Akamai, and is the first to use the combined technology to control, authenticate, measure and report on webcast audiences.

"Until now, it had not been possible for streaming media businesses to provide detailed audience measurement reporting to their enterprise clients, as well as control access to content that may be subject to geographic distribution limitations," said George Conrades, chairman and CEO of Akamai. "Reliacast’s Audience Manager software complements our content delivery services by bringing this first-of-its-find value to clients who need this information in order to realize a return on their investment when streaming digital content."

Reliacast’s Audience Manager technology enables content providers access to real-time reports about who is watching their media-rich events and insights into how they are reacting to specific content. Akamai’s EdgeScape geo-location service provides content control and customization of digital content that can be targeted and delivered from locations optimized for each end user. By integrating Akamai’s EdgeScape service, Reliacast will offer geographic containment capabilities that will allow content providers to reach targeted markets and manage distribution rights restrictions by being able to pinpoint the geographic location of end users.

"The Reliacast/Akamai alliance is ‘mission critical’ to us at BizNews 24 and to our clients," said Jay Lucas, chairman and CEO of BizNews24. "Our ‘special sauce’ is to achieve results for our customers by leveraging the power of rich, web-based video. Reliacast’s audience management technology will provide BizNews 24 and our enterprise clients, with pinpoint insight and reporting into the audiences participating in the webcasts we produce. Our clients see these tools as the driver behind realizing and measuring a return on their investment from streaming media today."

Media and entertainment companies can create new business models around pay-per-view events and advance3d audience demographic reporting and marketers and advertisers can obtain comprehensive audience metrics and deploy targeted advertising and promotions.

"The use of digital content by businesses, from enterprises to media and entertainment companies, is becoming an increasingly popular medium to communicate with both internal and external audiences," said Micheal Hoch, senior analyst with Aberdeen Group. "A key delivery element — particularly for streaming and rich media — is the ability to know who the audience is, and understand the audience’s behavior. The strategic alliance between Reliacast and Akamai fills this void for businesses by enabling them to determine where their content is going, who is interacting with it and how those end-users are behaving."