Video: How to Create Smarter Networks for Streaming
Learn more about enterprise streaming at Streaming Media's next event.
Watch the complete video of this panel from Streaming Media West, Rethinking Enterprise Video Solutions, in the Streaming Media Conference Video Portal.
Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Stephen Condon: The area which we specialize in is creating smarter networks for streaming, especially within the enterprise. The networking of video is a key consideration in embracing and adopting streaming solutions.
As you can see, from Wainhouse Research, that the ability to distribute video without harming the corporate network, the challenges around distributing video are key issues enterprises face in deploying streaming within the enterprise. Networking is one of their primary concerns.
There are different strategies that can be used, or different tools that can be used for distributing video within the enterprise. You can use your existing network and deploy caching boxes, or equipment in your headends. IP multicast is one of those techniques. You can deploy an overlay network to distribute video, in each of your subnets deploy caching boxes in each of your headends, which is called an enterprise CDN.
Or you can do what our product does, which is a pure software distribution approach, where you deploy software which helps you network the video. That is P2P/UDP distribution.
Just a little detail on how P2P works. Rather than everyone getting their own unicast stream, P2P works by taking one stream into each subnet, and then using the buffer region in HTML5 video to enable everyone to view that one stream. It's like Napster for the internet.
Our tool is an enterprise software, peer-to-peer distribution technology for video. We work for both live and on-demand video, and effectively you can deliver one stream to each subnet, and then everyone shares that stream. One of the things we're able to do, you can do it two ways, you can do it via WebRTC, or you can do it via an installed client.
One of the things about having an installed client on each of the endpoints is that we're able to receive detailed statistics on the viewer experience from the desktop and each of the devices, and present that data in a very easy to use and understand format, so that you can see, "Where are the problems in my network? Are any particular operating systems giving me problems? Are any particular browsers giving me problems? Where I am being able to deliver a good video experience?”
We can give detailed performance data that can be drilled down all the way down to the individual user level. And one of the really nice things is you can do this end to end before you hold a live event, or before you hold an event, you can silently test in the background to see what the end-user experience is going to be without the involvement of your users.
Obviously, with most of our use cases, when we get pulled in is, "A CEO wants to do a town hall meeting. He wants to be able to broadcast in this video. He could do it at his last company, why can't I do it now?"
We plug into Microsoft’s suite of video products, calls us and says, "Got a customer that needs to do a live webcast, they don't have faith that their network can hold it. Can you guys work with the customer to enable them to stream live via Skype Meeting broadcast, or Teams, or another application?"
What we can do is deploy, and they can actually see what their end-user experience is going to be before their CEO gets up to give a webcast. Then they have some particular networks that aren't going to work properly, but at least they can notify them in advance and let them know, "Hey, there's going to be an issue with video in your particular location,” and try and find a solution before they actually start the live webcast.
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