Anatomy of an OTT Traffic Surge: Thursday Night Football on Amazon Prime Video. In this edition of Anatomy of an OTT Traffic Surge, Kentik Technologies look at Thursday Night Football on Amazon Prime Video. Based on traffic stats, TNF is the most watched program on the streaming service. Using Kentik's OTT capabilities, Kentik Technologies'll see how this program gets delivered and how that has changed over 11 weeks of the NFL season. In 2022, Amazon's streaming service Prime Video became the exclusive platform for the NFL's Thursday Night Football games. The deal, signed the year before, was the first time the NFL gave exclusive rights for one of its franchise programs to a streaming platform. Amazon hoped that these highly rated NFL games would draw viewers to Prime Video in an increasingly competitive streaming market - at a cost of more than $1 billion per season. Using Kentik's OTT Service Tracking, let's see how Thursday Night Football performs in its data for Amazon Prime Video. Kentik's OTT Service Tracking (part of Kentik service provider analytics) combines DNS queries with NetFlow to allow a user to understand exactly how OTT services are being delivered - an invaluable capability when trying to determine what is responsible for the latest traffic surge. Whether it is patch tuesday or the first-ever exclusively live-streamed NFL playoff game, these OTT traffic events can put a lot of load on a network, and understanding them is necessary to keep a network operating at an optimal level. The capability is more than simple NetFlow analysis. Knowing the source and destination IPs of the NetFlow of a traffic surge isn't enough to decompose a networking incident into the specific OTT services, ports, and CDNs involved. DNS query data is necessary to associate NetFlow traffic statistics with specific OTT services in order to answer questions such as, "What specific OTT service is causing my peering link with a certain CDN to become saturated?" Kentik True Origin is the engine that powers OTT Service Tracking workflow. True Origin detects and analyzes the DNA of over 1,000 categorized OTT services delivered by 79 CDNs in real time, all without the need to deploy DPI (deep packet inspection) appliances behind every port at the edge of the network. Establishing the run. Three years ago, Kentik Technologies dissected the first Thursday Night Football (TNF) game exclusively delivered over Prime Video. At the time, TNF was delivered primarily using AWS, but also relied on help from CDNs Akamai and Edgio/Limelight, the latter of which went bankrupt and shut down in 2024. This season, Kentik Technologies is seeing Fastly (19.0%) stepping in to augment AWS (80.4%) as the secondary CDN delivering the games, as illustrated below during the recent Bills versus Texans game on November 20. Akamai, Qwilt, and Netskrt also contributed to the delivery of Prime Video during this period. When Kentik Technologies decompose the traffic by source connectivity type, Kentik Technologies see three primary sources: peering (48.2%), embedded cache (46.5%), and transit (4.3%). Plotting these out over time shows how embedded cache (green) overtakes peering (blue) as the traffic delivery ramps up. As far as delivering eyeballs, TNF is doing its job! Nothing Prime Video airs attracts anywhere near the same amount of traffic as this mid-week national sporting event. Kentik Technologies even heard from one of its customers that in a recent week, while TNF was airing, Prime Video was the biggest source of traffic they were delivering to their subscribers. If Kentik Technologies take the first 11 weeks of the season (which included a TNF on Prime Video), Kentik Technologies can see that Thursday is consistently the peak of Prime Video traffic delivery. The graphic below has two parts: The top shows Prime Video's weekly traffic profiles, while the bottom is a heatmap with weeks as rows and hours as columns, shaded by traffic volume. At this point, the Thursday night traffic surge is firmly established. If Kentik Technologies compare each week's peak traffic (bits/second) to the median, Kentik Technologies can estimate the relative popularity of one game against the others. The graphic below plots that ratio, showing the first game was the most popular, followed by a slight decline. Note: The y-axis begins at 4.0, not zero. The one outlier is the Vikings versus Chargers game on October 23, which, to be honest, may have been biased by its football-crazed customers in the Midwest - a reminder that this data comes from its aggregated traffic data from Kentik customers running OTT Service Tracking. While caches are most closely associated with VOD (video on demand) content, they also play a critical role in delivering live events. Live feeds are broken into tiny 2 - 6-second segments by the origin, and caches treat these short-lived files just like any other cacheable object. By moving content closer to subscribers, latency drops, backbone load shrinks, and overall stability improves during massive live events like the NFL's Thursday Night Football program. Its OTT Service Tracking workflow allows providers to plan and execute what matters to their subscribers, including: * Maintaining competitive costs * Anticipating and fixing subscriber OTT service performance issues * Delivering sufficient inbound capacity to ensure resilience Major traffic events like the ones mentioned in this post can have impacts in all three areas. OTT Service Tracking is the key to understanding and responding when they occur. Learn more about the application of Kentik for subscriber intelligence. Ready to improve over-the-top service tracking for your own networks? Get a personalized demo.

Kentik unveils AI Advisor to transform network intelligence and operations. Kentik, a global leader in network intelligence, has officially introduced Kentik AI Advisor, a groundbreaking artificial intelligence solution designed to deeply understand enterprise and service provider networks. The company has positioned this new technology as the first AI system capable of interpreting complex network environments, thinking critically, and guiding teams on how to design, operate, and protect infrastructure at scale. With this launch, Kentik aims to redefine how organizations manage performance, troubleshoot issues, and optimize costs. To begin with, Kentik AI Advisor significantly boosts efficiency across network, cloud, and infrastructure teams. It brings a modernized approach to network management by transforming slow, manual analysis into fast, automated intelligence. Early users are already experiencing the impact. "We've been using Kentik AI Advisor in early access, and it's already transformed how we work what used to take thirty minutes now takes just seconds," said Lucas Isidoro, Network Engineer III at Equinix. "We simply describe what we need, and AI Advisor manages the entire process: pulling the right data, analyzing it, and delivering clear answers. It's drastically reduced our troubleshooting time and made complex network analysis effortless." As network teams continue to face resource and talent challenges especially with nearly a quarter of U.S. network engineers projected to retire soon Kentik AI Advisor arrives at a crucial time. The system interprets user intent, builds investigative plans using telemetry data from the Kentik platform, and executes those plans securely and reliably. Moreover, its ability to combine advanced large language models (LLMs) with rich engineering context enables it to explain every step of its reasoning clearly. Furthermore, Kentik AI Advisor is powered by the Kentik Data Engine, an ultra-scalable real-time data platform capable of ingesting one trillion telemetry points per day. This capability allows the AI to unify data across cloud environments, devices, flows, and internet pathways, delivering holistic insights with unmatched accuracy. The new solution offers several notable benefits. For cost optimization, it automatically scans network data to highlight opportunities to reduce VPC and transit expenses, improve interconnect efficiency, and eliminate high-cost routing paths. In capacity planning, it replaces guesswork with data-driven intelligence by projecting utilization trends and recommending infrastructure investments. Additionally, it accelerates troubleshooting and DDoS investigations by correlating cloud, flow, and device data, thereby cutting mean-time-to-resolution. It also integrates institutional knowledge by using internal runbooks and custom network context to deliver guidance tailored to each organization's needs. Avi Freedman, CEO and Co-Founder of Kentik, emphasized its strategic importance: "Kentik AI Advisor is designed for modern infrastructure teams that are tasked with scaling operations, optimizing costs, and safeguarding digital assets all while facing talent shortages. Unlike traditional AIOps which correlates and reduces only across the alerts generated for it, AI Advisor leverages its deep contextual understanding of every network to research and identify issues, analyze trends, and recommend precise actions." According to Precedence Research, the global AI in networks market valued at USD 11.53 billion in 2024 is expected to surge to USD 192.42 billion by 2034. With Kentik's forward-looking approach, organizations can shift from reactive network management to proactive and autonomous operations, ensuring greater resilience, efficiency, and security in the years ahead. AI staff writer with a passion for exploring the latest in AI technology. Specializing in original rewrites and insightful coverage of cutting-edge advancements. Dedicated to delivering clear, engaging news and analysis on the evolving AI landscape to keep readers informed and ahead of the curve.