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Quickly Extend Live Streams with VOD Clipping

by Kristen Raybould on October 11, 2019

Time is always of the essence to extend compelling video content such as sporting events and concerts and make the most of media rights windows. This is especially true for catch-up TV, highlight creation, time-shifting 24/7 simulcast streams, and social sharing. At Akamai, we are continually making improvements that make it easier to extend content monetization, including a service that simplifies video-on-demand (VOD) clip creation from live streams in an effort to maximize ad revenue and viewer engagement for live events.

Live-to-VOD clipping creates new opportunities to engage audiences and extend the monetization of content while providing a TV experience online. With Media Services Live customers have a streamlined way to quickly create a “clip” from Apple Live HLS streams and convert that into an on-demand asset – dramatically decreasing the window between a live stream airing and access to it on-demand. While this seems like a simple task on the surface, the use cases for when, why, and how VOD assets are created and shared vary greatly from customer to customer and industry to industry.

How does it work?

• The clips are created through setting query parameters for START and END time in the playback URLs.

• A modified URL is then generated for the clip that holds the information around which segment of the stream to play from the archive.

• Clips can be managed from the archive through an OPEN API with the ability to playback the content and create multiple clips (assets) from it using the clipping tool.

• An automated process runs to create new, clipped assets.

• Anything beyond the initial 30-minute window is stored on NetStorage to provide longer scrub back windows, creating a storage of live streams specifically for the purposes of editing them later.