Question

The Case

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is the leading professional basketball league in the United States and Canada with 30 teams. The NBA is one of four North American professional sports leagues. The other leagues are the Major League Baseball, the National Football League, and the National Hockey League. While focused on the North America, the NBA has a large international following and is televised in 212 countries and 42 languages around the world.

Increasingly, fans want and expect high quality game videos, RSS feeds, widgets, and Fantasy leagues. NBA.com has an inventory of over 400,000 digital assets, including 15,000 videos. Last year, there were over 850 unique visits to NBA.com from 20 countries.

Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM) is a company that provides a distributed computing platform for global Internet content and application delivery. Akamai is head- quartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was founded in 1998 by MIT graduate student Daniel Lewin, along with MIT Applied Mathematics professor Tom Leighton and MIT Sloan School of Management students Jonathan Seelig and Preetish Nijhawan. Leighton still serves as Akamai’s Chief Scientist, while Lewin was killed aboard American Airlines flight 11, which was crashed in the September 11 attacks of 2001. Akamai is a Hawaiian word meaning smart or intelligent.

Akamai’s primary service is provided by its proprietary EdgeNetwork. Akamai transparently mirrors content—sometimes all content, including HTML and CSS, and sometimes   just media objects such as audio, graphics, animation, and video—from customer servers. Large firms deliver their content to over 200,000 Akamai servers in 110 countries. These local Akamai servers cache (store) this content awaiting local demand. Akamai’s network is intelligent enough not to distribute content to a local server until and unless there is local demand.

AKAMAI’S GLOBAL CONTENT DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM

1. User requests Web Site content and is intelligently directed to nearby Edge server Globally Distributed Content Delive Networ 2. Content is assembled & delivered wwocessosos stored metadata If needed, dynamic ent is retrieved via Origin Site 3. Content is delivered quickly instructions an optimized connection Gatew and reliably to the user Gateway) 200,000 servers

When you click on an online video at NBA.com, the domain name is the same, but the IP address points to an Akamai server rather than the NBA server. The Akamai server is automatically picked depending on the type of content and the user’s network location.

Akamai’s EdgePlatform is one of the world’s largest distributed computing platforms. The benefit is that users can receive content from whichever Akamai server is closest to them or has a good connection, leading to faster download times and less vulnerability to network congestion or outages. The Internet was never designed to handle large volumes of video simultaneously streaming from a single corporate server to all Internet devices. However, this content can be sent to the “edge” of the network where Akamai servers are located, and on a local or regional basis, stream this content on demand from local servers. Akamai’s 200,000 distributed servers allow it to monitor global Internet traffic patterns, attacks on the Internet, and latency (delays caused by excessive Internet traffic).

In addition to image caching, Akamai provides services which accelerate dynamic and personalized content and streaming media. Akamai’s personalization product is called EdgeScape, a geolocation service. Much Web content delivered by Akamai is personalized to the user’s location and Internet service types. This allows Akamai’s customers to gain insight into where end users are coming from and what kind of Internet service they are using. Armed with this knowledge they can customize Web content for individual end users through a wide range of criteria, making their site more relevant and compelling to everyone who visits.

For instance, Akamai knows your:

Internet service provider:                                             

Verizon_Trademark_Services_LLC Country Code: US

Region Code: NY

City: NEWYORK

Area code: 212

Latitude: 40.7128

Longitude: 74.0092

County: NEWYORK

Time zone: EST

Network: Verizon

Throughput: vhigh

Akamai Stream OS is another service that runs on Akamai’s EdgePlatform. It enables the NBA to get more from its media by providing a simple, automated solution for managing more than 500,000 media assets, assigning business policies, and publishing content to multiple distribution channels. NBA.com and NBA Mobile reached a combined 16.7 billion page views and 4.2 billion video views in 2015. The NBA’s new Game Time mobile app set a new record with 7.5 million global downloads in 2015.

Since implementing Akamai Stream OS, com’s traffic has increased exponentially, with over 35M unique users in 222 countries accessing NBA Web content each mont.

Akamai’s suite of products has helped the NBA reach record traffic levels, with over 35M unique global users per month, while effectively maintaining employment and infrastructure

The reach and stability of Akamai’s network have allowed the NBA to grow advertising revenues by 500 percent since.

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Reference: Your individual case assignment for document layout

Below you will find the questions for this assignment

Using Porter's competitive forces model, analyze the NBA's market situation. How does the use of Akamai help the NBA compete in this market?

Using Porter's our generic strategies model, what do you think is the NBA's overall strategy or strategies?

Why is it important that all fans in the world have the same experience?

Why is it important that individual franchise owners can build, manage, and distribute on the NBA platform their own content?

The word "partnership" appears several times in the video. Who are the NBA's partners? How does the concept of a strategic ecosystem help understand the NBA's partnership strategies?

Answer 1

1. Potential entrants are college basketball, MLB NHL
2 threats are major American sports leagues and P2P platforms.
There is high bargaining power for basketball fans because they have TV, live content etc. NBA.come can provide additional content surrounding the match
There is low bargaining power for media houses as NBA dictates huge fees for TV rights.
The bargaining power is low for suppliers as there are many with same CDN.
The entry barriers is less for Akamai because if copyright, high speed buffering and free content means there is no privacy.

2. The NBA strategys is differentiation which is based on improved perfomance, differentiated offerings and technological advancement which is as a result of Akamai's support. This differentiation is aided by global approach aided by celebrity strategy.

3. NBA is a global phenomenon with many foreign players playing in it. It is important for the non American fans to feel included and not left out. This is the reason that all fans across the world feel the same experience.

4. Akamai provides the perfect platform for each of the NBA team to build their own image and connect to their own franchise market. To build a stronger franchise brand, it is very essential to that each individual franchise owners gets to manage their own content.