Case Study: Akamai Helps Canadian Media Company Boost Traffic, Reduce Costs

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Canadian-based CHUM Limited is one of the country’s leading media companies with more than 32 radio stations, 12 local television stations, and 21 specialty channels. CHUM’s content is also distributed via new media platforms including interactive television, wireless services, and the Internet. CHUM Interactive, the online division of CHUM Limited, relies on Internet properties to supplement the traditional news, information and entertainment delivery models to reach their audiences when they can’t access a television or radio. Surges of Web site activity triggered by breaking news and events were frequently pushing their existing hosting and bandwidth infrastructure to its limits.

As the popularity of CHUM’s Web sites increased, the existing infrastructure began to experience crippling spikes in traffic during high-profile music events or breaking news stories.

"Traffic surges were an enormous problem," says Dale Fallon, Manager of Operations at CHUM Interactive. "For example, events like the live coverage of the Pope’s visit to Toronto in 2002 would bring down the servers," explains Fallon. In addition, the operational crisis created by these traffic spikes would zap internal resources and pull IT staff and content producers from their core duties to deal with the sagging infrastructure. "Essentially we had an expensive infrastructure with load-balanced servers, but no capability to deal with the big usage spikes," explains Fallon.

The Goal
CHUM Interactive needed to address infrastructure performance and reliability issues as well as internal concerns about resources and processes. Specifically, CHUM sought to:
• Deliver High Quality, Reliable Streaming Media During Usage Spikes
• Improve End-User Experience
• Reduce Infrastructure Costs

To support their growing business, CHUM wanted to be sure Akamai could deliver tangible results. Akamai offered CHUM a pilot program to prove their streaming capabilities and demonstrate ROI. There were three main success criteria for the pilot: significant offload of requests for streaming files, overall download performance improvement, and ease of integration.