Akamai Wins Emmy® Award

Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM), the intelligent edge platform for securing and delivering digital experiences, today announced the company will receive a Technology & Engineering Emmy® Award from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS). The award recognizes Akamai for “excellence in engineering creativity” for its work on Content Delivery Networks (CDN). Akamai, which pioneered the CDN 20 years ago as a means to address the then-emerging challenge of congestion on the internet, is the sole honoree in the category.

“Akamai receiving an Emmy® Award is an extraordinary honor and a testament to the relentless work and passion of countless people who helped make delivering television over the internet a reality,” said Tom Leighton, Akamai CEO and co-founder. “Recognizing CDNs with one of the television industry’s highest accolades shows how much this technology has evolved, to where watching TV over the internet is the same and often better experience as watching over the air, via satellite or through cable. This was never more evident than in 2020, when hundreds of millions of people around the world, under strict COVID-19 isolation and distancing protocols, turned to their favorite streaming services for important news and entertainment. CDN technology proved vital to helping those services withstand the sudden and massive spike in user traffic while continuing to deliver their content without interruption.”

Akamai’s Intelligent Edge Platform is the world’s most pervasive CDN, consisting of approximately 325,000 servers in more than 130 countries and nearly 1,500 networks around the world. Designed to deliver content at the highest possible quality from as close to the end user as possible, more than 400 broadcast, pay TV networks and OTT services trust Akamai to help deliver live and on-demand sports, news, movies, TV shows and other programming to audiences worldwide.

“When we started Akamai as a project in my office at MIT, the notion of streaming TV shows, films and live sports to broadcast-scale audiences at HD - and now 4K quality - was a dream,” said Leighton. “It is now a reality. But this is just the beginning; we still have a tremendous runway ahead of us to revolutionize how television is delivered and consumed.”

NATAS presents the Technology & Engineering Emmy® Awards each year to recipients that have been “involved in television engineering technologies which either represent so extensive an improvement on existing methods or are so innovative in nature that they materially have affected television,” according to the organization. Recipients are judged and selected by a committee of industry experts and peers.

Akamai, along with this year’s other recipients, will be honored at the 72nd Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy® Awards Ceremony that is tentatively scheduled to be a virtual ceremony in partnership with the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show/conference on Sunday October 10, 2021.