65th Annual Cannes Film Festival Leverages Akamai

Akamai Technologies SARL announced that its HD Network will provide online video coverage of the 65th Cannes International Film Festival to all mobile-connected attendees and also to official website visitors.

In 2011, for the first time in the event’s history, Akamai delivered movie trailers and related on-demand content to iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry devices across the its Intelligent Platform’s HD Network. Following this initiative, the red carpet events, new films and trailers will again be offered via streaming to all connected and mobile devices.

By simplifying the process of HD delivery to mobile and tablet devices, Akamai has lowered the barrier to new content experiences, allowing festival directors and burgeoning filmmakers alike to define their digital strategy without having to master every element of digital distribution technology, and enabling digital marketing at every stage of the distribution cycle.

"The Cannes Film Festival is one of the industry’s most prestigious events and our relationship stretches back over many years and has seen Akamai delivering the Festival’s Internet content from as early as 2000," said Stuart Cleary, EMEA product director of Digital Media at Akamai. "We are honored to once again be streaming trailers of films being screened at the event – as well as content from the proceedings and awards presentations – to fans and film enthusiasts, allowing them to experience the atmosphere and excitement of the globally recognized film festival alongside those actually attending the event. And, as the Festival has embraced the digital age and all the opportunities it presents, we’re very proud to be an integral part in enabling that to happen."

Part of Akamai Sola Media Solutions, the Akamai HD Network is a cloud-based technology platform for live and on-demand video streaming which scales on-demand to support large online events by managing millions of simultaneous streams. Supported by the Akamai Intelligent Platform, it enables the economic online distribution of content a broad array of devices, delivering HD quality video to any device at broadcast-size audiences.