Last week at the NABShow I did a short video interview with Kurt Michel, Akamai's director of product marketing - media solutions. Akamai has always been known primarily as a content delivery network, but as Kurt explains, it is broadening its positioning to become an online media platform.

Akamai is responding to what it is hearing from its media customers, that they're experiencing unprecedented challenges given the proliferation of devices, formats, networks and bandwidth variability. As a result, Akamai has expanded beyond delivery to also offer content preparation and workflow solutions under its Sola Vision branding.

In the interview, Kurt talks about Akamai's newly announced Viewer Diagnostics capability in its Sola Analytics media measurement and analysis product. This allows content providers to analyze viewership down to the individual level. Kurt also describes Akamai's Ad Integration Services, which is a server-side ad insertion approach that I wrote about recently. And he touches on Akamai's cloud-based transcoding capability.

(Note: Akamai is a VideoNuze sponsor)