On the heals of Limelight Network’s acquisition of Delve Network which I wrote about last week, Brightcove, one of the leading Online Video Platforms (OVP) in the world, today announced that it is ditching Limelight in favor of Akamai, the world’s largest Content Delivery Network (CDN). The agreement between the companies is presented as a wide-ranging alliance to drive quality, performance, and innovation in the online video industry and represents an end-to-end offer that makes high-quality video publishing and distribution easily available for businesses and organizations of all sizes. The two companies have a combined customer base that includes the leading media, e-commerce, and enterprise companies, as well as small businesses around the globe.  The integrated solution is designed to give customers a fast, seamless path to leverage the proven advantages of Akamai's HD Network and Brightcove's feature-rich online video platform to deliver high quality, adaptive bit rate video across Flash and iOS devices. Going forward, Brightcove will provide the Akamai HD Network as a bundled component of the Brightcove online video platform service. The deal is sure to be a blow to Limelight but hardly a surprising one after its acquisition of Delve Networks last week. Meanwhile, the deal represents a great win for Akamai as Brightcove brings with it a bunch of media customers as well as small and medium sized enterprise customers from around the world. As this deal brings together a leading OVP with a leading CDN it represents the highest profile deal to date in our opinion and give further impetus to the convergence trend between the CDN industry and the OVP industry that we have been predicting for some time. Martin Olausson Client reading: Online Video Platforms: Battling for Supremacy in a Fiercely Competitive Market