High performance content at the edge

Fastly reports expanded adoption of its edge offerings and services across leading European media and entertainment brands. Fastly customers, such as Paradox Interactive, PRISA, RCS MediaGroup, and ZEIT ONLINE, employ Fastly’s high-density points of presence to power gaming, streaming or over-the-top (OTT) video, breaking news, and more as the need to support high volumes of simultaneous viewers, gamers, and readers with high-quality experiences increases.

High impact streaming and media services that prevent lag and latency are essential for brands to successfully serve a global customer base. As media companies continue to evolve from their traditional print and broadcast models, they are leveraging new services and technologies to help them scale and monetise new digital models. This evolution has allowed more viewers, gamers, and readers to access media content, but higher traffic can also lead to a host of user experience issues, including challenges associated with a sudden influx of traffic requesting the same source. Fastly’s modern network architecture and edge capabilities, like request collapsing and load balancing, help large and growing media companies support live and high volume traffic, even during spikes due to breaking news, prime gaming windows, or a big sporting event.  

“Providing our customers with optimal viewing experiences is a top priority for us,” said Jorge Martin Ibarra, CTO/CIO at PRISA. “We found Fastly’s Instant Purge and DevOps capabilities, in addition to their impressive dedication to tech support, attractive in this pursuit. Our developers now enjoy the benefits of instant configuration changes and real-time control, allowing us to deliver the high-quality experience our customers have come to rely on us for.”

Amidst these increasing end user expectations for content consumption, live streaming has come into its heyday, bringing with it a new set of delivery and quality of experience challenges. For media companies that offer live streaming, Fastly’s Media Shield continues to bolster performance and availability by caching more content in high-density data centres, thereby reducing startup times and playback interruptions. Media Shield – a multi-CDN deployment optimisation service that sits between a company’s CDN deployments and its central cloud or on-premise infrastructure – also reduces egress costs and total cost of ownership (TCO) by eliminating extraneous requests. The solution allows for flexible deployments, can be used with or without Fastly for edge delivery, and does not require you to re-evaluate existing contractual commitments with other CDNs.

“There have never been greater demands on media and entertainment companies to deliver dynamic content in the moment,” comments Fastly General Manager of EMEA, Gonzalo de la Vega. “That’s why we’ve been focused on providing the fast, efficient, and scalable infrastructure media companies require to deliver high-quality experiences. The edge of the internet is the best place to unlock these capabilities, where fewer but more powerful points-of-presence prove much more effective than thousands of scattered data centres.”