Video: 4 Ways to Future-Proof Your Enterprise Video Platform
Whether the content you're delivering is live or on-demand, your enterprise video infrastructure needs to be reliable, robust, and versatile enough to make sure your content is always available to meet your users' needs today, tomorrow, and two years from now, according to EastBanc VP Eric Hoffman. In this clip from his panel at Streaming Media East 2016 he offers four essential strategies for ensuring that your EVP meets the expectations of your employers, your stakeholders, and your end users now and in the foreseeable future.
Learn more about enterprise video at Streaming Media West.
Read the full transcript of the clip above:
Eric Hoffman: Always have a Plan B. It's amazing to me that some of the large customers that I work with don't have a Plan B. They've been relying on a content delivery network for years, and it's never gone down. I've had discussions with them where they're doing something really important, whether it's a live event or even if it's on demand, and things don't work. Then they lose their jobs because that's what you're suppose to do, you're suppose to make sure your content is always available.
What does having a Plan B mean? Go back, always question what you have. Not to the point where you're paranoid, but question your infrastructure. Is this going to meet the needs today, tomorrow, and two years from now? Present that plan to your business holders. If you're proactive about that, if someone's coming to you asking for that business plan of how we're going to meet the needs or how we're going to grow the business over the next two years and you don't have that in your hand, you should start worrying. A lot of times when we're brought in, that's exactly what happened. They didn't plan, they had this big event with an election, they had the content they needed to provide, they had a learning management system they were trying to launch and they had, they thought they were going to have 20,000 active users and they ended up having 300,000 active users and it melted their servers. The servers just crashed and it was a complete disaster.
Number 2: Always look for perfect versus correct. A lot of the IT and business decision managers that we work with struggle with this. They want the perfect system and of course you have limitations of budget and realities of time and resources and physics. Be careful on that one.
Number 3: Always be adding value. Whatever you're going to build, whatever you're working on, it doesn't matter what business you're in, I always ask somebody when they bring us in, like okay, we've got this problem, we can solve this problem, we're going to do this. We'll put this on-prem stuff in the cloud, we'll get rid of these licensing problems, but at the same time how are you adding value to what you're already doing? Oh, wow, I didn't think about adding value. Think about adding value, if you add value to it when you go back, you go back to your stake holders and you say I've solved the problem but I've also now, we can stream this in four different protocols, we can do MPEG DASH now, we didn't have that support. I've got high definition audio which we didn't have as part of the video now. We can add that on as a value-add on what we're selling.
Number 4: Test, test, test. Not the mic, test your stuff. I can't tell you how many times we've been brought in and say okay we need a testing platform, we need a way to put this in the cloud. e can spin the stuff out. We can do really fine-grain testing on this stuff before it goes out to production.
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