It’s fast, it’s smart, and it’s never been done before

Today customers check out your website before they pick up the phone. If your site is a yawn - and can’t get its point across quickly - you can forget about your goals of internet sales and brand loyalty. How do you wow the crowd and keep them interested enough to find out exactly what you can do for them? Give them a rich, interactive media experience they control while completely immersed in your brand. How do you do that? This is the tale of how Metaliq’s Top Banana technology served as a proof of concept and showed Akamai what Silverlight was capable of.

Akamai handles 20% of all internet traffic on the web! That’s billions of Web interactions every day. Commanding 25,000 high speed servers stationed around the globe, they have a God’s-eye view into the Internet. They speed up delivery of everything on the web with applied math and algorithms. Their high-caliber clients loved the speed, but were asking for a next generation windows media player that was customizable and controllable, without the hassle of converting files. It didn’t exist…yet. But tackling the impossible is what Akamai thrives on – and they jumped at the opportunity to lead the pack yet again.

Fate stepped in at Microsoft’s 2007 MIX. Akamai’s content delivery team was at the edge of their seats, exchanging glances and elbowing each other as a keynote speaker from Metaliq was presenting “Top Banana,” their new, free-form, Silverlight-based video editor. Akamai was blown away – they knew that Metaliq had the expertise to make their plan a reality. So there it was. Akamai found a kindred spirit, another partner that was determined to stay ahead of the pack.

Working closely with Akamai, Metaliq soon developed code that allowed their clients’ developers to fully customize a media player – change the skin, adjust size, add buttons, synch video with text – the possibilities were endless. And they made sure the underbelly of the program was just as good as the exterior. They programmed the underlying code the best way and the right way, so customers would have confidence in the media player they designed – no hidden surprises, and no way to mess it up during the customization or branding.