Akamai has been showing off its bufferless Flash streaming service at the Adobe Max festival in San Francisco.

The popular application allows viewers to watch live or recorded video without buffering interruptions.

A company representative told the IT Examiner that Akamai avoids slowdowns and quality degradations by sending multiple copies of the same stream over different routes. The application forms a single, optimal thread after determining the connection speed of a user. Akamai is then able to compensate for abrupt slowdowns by automatically shifting to a lower-quality stream, which allows for seamless and uninterruped viewing. 

According to the representative, companies like Hulu (an Akamai client) could very well represent the future of online streaming, as the service successfully shields consumers from tedious back-end load-balancing and annoying buffering delays. 

Akamai, which operates a network of 34,000 servers in 70 countries, offers support for Apple Quicktime, Microsoft Windows Media, Real Systems G2 and Adobe Flash Streaming. The firm also provides hosts with detailed reports on streams and visitors, including average time played, player version and geographic location.

As IT Examiner previously reported, online streaming has quickly increased in popularity. According to Tom Wolzien of Bernstein Research, the price of a 300KBps video stream is on a par with various services offered by cable services. In addition, various compression technologies have improved at an impressive rate of 15 per cent per year. X

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