Speculation was rampant the last few weeks that Google had to rely on a third party content delivery network to make the YouTube Live live concert stream properly at scale. Despite the fact that Google has it’s own quite impressive CDN, streaming live video (as opposed to progressive downloads, which YouTube has historically relied on) is hard stuff. And expensive – you have to license Adobe’s Flash Media Server, or a competitor like Wowza, and pay at least a couple of cents per gigabyte transferred on top of normal costs.
We’d heard rumors that Google had partnered with one of the big three live streaming services – Mogulus, Ustream or Justin.TV. And in fact Google has met with all of those startups to discuss partnerships or an outright acquisition.
But instead of working with them, or building their own streaming media CDN, they chose to work with Akamai.
Google Relies On Akamai To Stream YouTube Live; 700,000 Concurrent Viewers
