LAS VEGAS — Remember your old 56Kbps modem, screeching along and laboring to buffer a video clip, in the early days of internet media?

Well, those days are gone. Now, television networks want to deliver round-the-clock TV channels over the internet – and the quality can be even better than cable TV, according to one technology exec.

“The internet was never built with the whole notion of having  live, linear 24/7 channel on it,” Noreen Hafez, global product marketing director of network optimisation company Akamai, tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

But Akamai has recently rearchitected its offering, launching a suite called Media Services Live that includes UDP acceleration and remaps content around network congestion bottlenecks – and which Hafez says can stream TV in higher definition than, well, TV.

At NAB Show, Hafez was showing visitors a comparative demo of one channel delivered, respectively, over cable and over the new technology.

“We’re watching the quality and the latency between the two,” she says. “We’re way better in quality – higher bit rates, crisp picture, resolution – we’re two to three seconds ahead of traditional broadcast cable television.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas.   The series is sponsored by Ooyala.  For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.