Case Study: CBC/Radio‑Canada achieves 18M+ Canadian reach ahead of schedule with Akamai Technologies' Image Manager

CBC - Customer Case Study

CBC/Radio‑Canada, Canada’s national public broadcaster, set an ambitious goal to reach 18 million Canadians by 2020. To support a mobile-first, personalized experience the site moved from a simple CMS to responsive, API-driven pages, but client-side image sizing and richer media blew page weight from ~700 KB to 6–8 MB and hurt first meaningful paint.

After testing solutions, CBC integrated Akamai Image Manager to automate real-time image optimization. Images shrank 80–90%, dynamic pages dropped to under 1 MB, and page loads fell below four seconds—cutting bounce rates to under 50%. The performance gains (Image Manager delivered ~15% better results than competitors) helped CBC surpass its 18 million target nearly two years early.

CBC

Massimo Mollica

Manager of WebOps & Infrastructure