Enterprise Video Streaming: Challenges, Opportunities & Solutions
Let’s face it: video has become an integral part of business communication. In the year 2020, companies saw a significant increase and demand for live and on-demand video – coming from employees and for keeping in touch with customers, suppliers, and partners. Using video as a way for communication, collaboration, and doing business, has changed how we work for the long term. The COVID-19 outbreak had a big drive on this, but it is also fueled by the following reasons:
- Media content and consumption have dominated our private lives, and we’ve taken that habit to our way of working.
- Video, both live and on-demand, is increasingly used as a marketing tool and an effective communication method.
- Recording and publishing video professionally is getting easier and cheaper.
- Live video adds a personal touch to communication when being separated in different locations.
In 2020, we experienced these rising use cases for enterprise video streaming and on-demand video:
- Digital town hall meetings
- Hybrid events for customers and partners
- On-demand content for e-learning and onboarding
- Online conferences and general collaboration
- Webcasts, webinars, e-learning, and video marketing
- Training and onboarding sessions for new employees
Why companies need to implement a video communication strategy now
Be it in B2C or B2B, companies realized they need to act now and work on their video communication strategy, especially concerning live video. Most companies will face one common challenge in 2021: the majority of employees will return to the offices but have adapted their way of working using video. In light of this, implementing a company-wide enterprise video solution and strategy isn’t something you should postpone. If you want to avoid issues and get the most out of the new way of working for your employees, you should act now.
Implementing an enterprise video solution – strategic and technical challenges
Implementing a video streaming solution (whether it is for a one-time event or as a lasting solution) is a large project for the whole company. It involves several stakeholders. Usually, the following departments need to be involved:
- Organization / Project Management
- Marketing
- IT / Operations
- Communications
- Management
- Finance / Purchasing
- and others, based on the companies use cases and structure
The first thing to do is choosing an enterprise video platform, which is a difficult task all in itself. To assist you with this critical first decision: Here’s a guide with everything you’ll need to consider. After stakeholders and deciders have agreed on a solution, there are still technical challenges that need to be solved:
- Companies are dealing with limited Internet bandwidth available for video streaming.
- Increased video usage on the network stresses internal network capacity, jeopardizing critical network business processes’ proper function.
- High-quality video expectations based on working from home put high pressure on companies to deliver a similar quality level across corporate networks and thus avoid frustrated employees.
If the above is not taken seriously in time, this will result in:
- Poor quality video streaming (buffering, latency, low resolution)
- Limitation in scalability (streaming to a large audience is nearly impossible)
- Network congestion that jeopardizes other business-relevant processes
Therefore, IT departments should introduce a content delivery solution that makes enterprise streaming possible in the first place. What makes it challenging is that most companies put a high value on:
- Compatibility: the chosen content delivery solution should work with the existing or future Enterprise Video Platforms and infrastructure and be future-proof.
- Simplicity: the chosen content delivery solution should work seamlessly within the corporate environment without complicated software installations, additional software on laptops and desktops, and/or changes to the network.
- Security: the chosen content delivery solution should fulfill all legal data security requirements like GDPR, encryption, secure connectivity, access restrictions, and emphasize protecting confidential business data.
- On-premise-friendly: for some verticals, additional SaaS- or public cloud-hosted solutions are not allowed. Therefore, they have the additional requirement to run locally within the company’s infrastructure in whole or in part.
On top, especially large companies have complicated setups and infrastructures that make large-scale enterprise streaming more challenging, like:
- Hybrid working (a mix between people working fully remote and from the office, accessing the corporate network via VPN)
- Internal security guidelines like browsers with mDNS activation are a burden to delivery solutions
- Decentralized organizations with several locations and subnets
What companies need to do now to be fully prepared for 2021:
Solving the challenges of enterprise video without changing the whole network infrastructure
In 2021, employees will be returning to the offices with newly adapted video habits. In conclusion, companies need a technical delivery solution that solves video delivery problems and is easy to implement. That’s where a P2P eCDN comes into play.
A P2P enterprise content delivery network allows you to deliver high-quality, scalable live video streams at minimum bandwidth requirements. It establishes connections between the devices streaming the video content. Once connected, these devices can cache and share video data, as they are streaming the same content at the same time. Thanks to this approach, requests to the origin server or public CDN are significantly reduced. Because of this, bandwidth savings of up to 95% are possible – resulting in a stable, high-quality video stream for all employees at the same time. The best part: The network can grow dynamically, resulting in unlimited scalability. It is utterly flexible without a single point of failure. Find out more about P2P CDN technology here.
StriveCast Enterprise – the AI-based P2P eCDN
StriveCast Enterprise is the P2P eCDN solution that is based on WebRTC and therefore is 100% browser-based. The distribution’s approach saves up to 95% bandwidth and thus offers the following benefits for the companies:
Best Quality of Experience: Viewers can continuously stream in high-quality
- Bye, bye bottlenecks: Seamless video delivery with low latency and no buffering
- Gets better every time: AI-based features for smart solutions remember best working settings and improve with every stream
- Flexible use cases: Suitable for one-time events but also recurring ones
- Compatible to all modern browsers: StriveCast easily works in all modern browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, iOS Safari, Android Chrome, and Edge
More about StriveCast Enterprise
StriveCast - the number one partner for large companies:
This year, StriveCast supported several large companies which needed to organize their company events as a live video stream for the first time. The main challenge consisted of ensuring a stable, high-quality live stream for several hours to an audience of thousands of viewers – with some of them joining from the office and some joining from home via VPN. Below is a real-life example of a future-driven company that already solved its enterprise video delivery and is well-prepared for the future of video communications. The chemical and consumer goods company Henkel delivered a town hall meeting to thousands of employees with the help of StriveCast Enterprise.
Henkel - Delivering a town hall meeting to more than 2,000 employees
Henkel, a multinational enterprise for chemical and consumer goods, organized an all-digital town hall meeting for more than 2,000 employees with StriveCast’s P2P eCDN technology. Download the complete customer success story to see how StriveCast Enterprise achieved an average bandwidth savings rate of 79%, enabling the live stream’s performance without crashing the network. Get the full case study report here.
About StriveCast:
StriveCast is the client-less eCDN that solves enterprise video delivery. StriveCast requires no local software installation and works inside any Enterprise Video Platform. It reduces bandwidth requirements for internal webcasting by up to 95%. StriveCast offers a cloud and on-premise solution for full control and data privacy to combine maximum security and scalability. On top of that, StriveCast offers real-time video analytics for high-end user insights and video KPIs. Convinced customers and partners include companies like Swisscom, Siemens, Gazprom, and the NEP group. Today, StriveCast connects over 150,000 users worldwide daily with its unique server-side-managed Peer-To-Peer network. More information on www.strivecast.com
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