Making a switch

Notice anything different about Fusion this week? Hopefully you haven’t, but there is a change: We’ve switched our streaming service provider from Akamai to Speedera. Thankfully, we don’t have a million streaming files, because it was a pain to dig through what we do have, download it, re-upload it and then fix all the associated .ram and .asx files scattered around our own server farm.

I’ve been using Speedera a couple weeks now and like what I’ve seen so far. First, the Web interface – SpeedEye – is great and full of excellent tools such as log reports and an ad hoc page performance checker. You can upload and manage files right from the SpeedEye interface, no need for a separate FTP client. (I recommend using one though for the larger files, because the Web interface does not have a progress meter, making it difficult to tell how much time you have to twidle your thumbs.) Another plus is there’s no need to “akamaize” streaming URLs. Just upload the file, go into the SpeedEye interface, right click on the file you just uploaded and select “Copy Shortcut” (if using IE) then paste that into your meta file. No more clunky command line interface.

One thing I still need to get used to is the two separate domains for streaming Real and Windows Media. With Akamai, I just uploaded everything to the same directory. Now I basically have two mirrored directory trees, one for Real content and the other for stuff encoded in Windows Media. In SpeedEye, a drop-down menu makes navigating between the two directories relatively easy. But it’s can be easy to forget which side of the house you’re in when uploading files.