An open field for NFL video

Two local firms, Akamai Technologies and Signiant, help deliver NFL video. (Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)

Fans watching the Patriots take on the New York Giants today will focus on the field, but behind the scenes, two lesser-known local companies are playing a key part in this year's historic season by helping pipe the action into people's homes.

Akamai Technologies Inc. of Cambridge powers content distribution and streaming video for the New England Patriots and NFL websites, and helps more than half of the national Super Bowl advertisers deal with the surge in Internet traffic during the commercial breaks. After the game is over, Signiant Inc. in Burlington provides the digital pipeline that feeds clips and other action to postgame shows on the NFL Network, effectively allowing two studios thousands of miles away to function as one.

Brad Rinklin, vice president of global marketing for Akamai, said he knows that the average consumer watching the Super Bowl is focused on nothing more than the raw broadcast.

"Sometimes we describe ourselves as the largest global footprint service provider that you use every single day but never heard of," he said.

Throughout the game, Akamai provides the content for eager fans who log on to the Patriots' website for game updates and snips of video. But Akamai also provides content distribution and streaming video for the majority of advertisers, and gives firms a way of measuring the effectiveness of the millions they spent on 30-second spots.

This year, Akamai will post a public index of its Super Bowl advertisers' Web traffic, showing how website visitors surge and wane at regular intervals as fans are lured away from the dip and onto the Internet during commercial breaks, and then are riveted back to the game.

Last weekend, on its home page, Akamai also powered live feeds from five podiums, broadcasting the Patriots' press conference on arrival in Arizona directly to fans. Viewers had the ability to choose which feed to watch, giving them an inside look, like being in the press box, rather than being restricted to the bits that dribble into televised news pieces. That experience - like controlling a television studio from the keyboard - reflects a larger push in media that puts more control and content into the hands of viewers.

"Seeing all the feeds playing on one page simultaneously Sunday night was pretty exciting," said Fred Kirsch, publisher of Patriots content, in a statement. "It also showed that the convergence of all digital media, as envisioned by some years ago, is fast approaching."

Signiant, a spinoff of Nortel that has raised $23 million in funding since 2000, makes software that helps media companies more efficiently distribute video files, and has become part of the essential plumbing for the NFL Network, which needs to review and bookmark 50 hours of footage each week during the season for its postgame shows.

"Back in the old days, media companies used to move and ship tapes around - you connect the VCR at one end and a VCR at the other end, hit play on one end, send it over satellite, catch it, hit record on the VCR on the other end," said Tony Lapolito, vice president of marketing for Signiant. "Signiant's magic is the ability to move files like you put on your iPod."

Before the NFL Network began using Signiant, production was far more time-intensive since production was split between a studio in Mount Laurel, N.J., and Culver City, Calif. At the NFL Network, transferring the clips was only a few steps away from "Sneakernet" - when people physically walked tape from one spot to another. A snip of archival footage or a clip of tape that needed to go from one studio to another required people on both ends to play and record the file, then move the clip into the editing system.

"What we were able to do with Signiant is take the concept of tying two facilities together," said Jeffrey Howard, senior executive of engineering and broadcast technologies for the NFL Media Group.

Signiant also helps power NBC's digital media distribution, and is trying to position itself as the infrastructure that makes it possible for all kinds of content producers to easily distribute media over dozens of platforms. Instead of moving the next episode of a show from the mother ship to a company like Amazon that might sell it as a download, or to a website where people can stream the show whenever they want, or to a cable service's bucket of on-demand programs, the company could use Signiant.

"They're kind of like a plumber for the broadband era, and that's not to do them any injustice," said Will Richmond, president of market intelligence company Broadband Directions. "Plumbing is an incredibly important part of our day-to-day lives."

Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.