Today we relaunched Cartoon Network’s Toonami Jetstream video player using flash streaming video via FMS (it was previously Windows Media and Flash). The migration was pretty seamless minus a few small bumps.

The main bump was the usage of Akamai’s authorization abilities. For those unfamiliar with this, Akamai offers the ability to only allow video plays with an auth token (aka you can’t request video unless you know the secret password Charlie). The bump really was in how this is implemented by Akamai for VOD. Akamai does an auth on socket connection vs on stream request. This means when going from video to video, you are tearing down a connection each time. This is expensive and also causes delays for setting up and playing the stream. Worse, if you were wanting to switch streams (think high quality to low quality) on the fly, you would be starting over vs just switching and buffering. You aren’t able to reuse the connection, which contrast to how typical implementations work, creating a branch in logic for this specific instance. Oddly, their live implementation works based on stream requests, so why not their VOD? Regardless it is easy to resolve, but not my cup of tea.

As we move towards FMS 3 and SWF verification (only allowing a specific SWF on a specific domain to make requests), I recommend moving away from auth towards this type of verification. The reasoning behind this, is that SWF verification could be transparent across CDNs, while the current auth implementation is very CDN specific. It also protects you from someone figuring out your auth keys.

All that said, it’s nice to see that all of Cartoon Network’s video players have now been migrated over to a more flexible format.