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General Information
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August 1, 2008
• Vol.30 Issue 31
Page(s) 9 in print issue
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Streaming Media In The Enterprise
Plenty Of Bandwidth & Network Know-How Are Key
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With YouTube emerging as the Internet’s video scrapbook, Amazon and Netflix offering downloadable movies, and video clips available on every news site, streaming media has become a centerpiece of today’s Web experience. Just as books and movies each have their role as entertainment vehicles, the Web has turned into a mix of text, sound, and video. As Kevin Towes, product manager for Adobe’s Dynamic Media Organization (www.adobe.com), puts it, “People are looking for more effective ways of communicating and demanding more high-quality content,” and streaming media is rapidly becoming a viable solution.
 Enterprise Use Of Streaming Media
While consumers are turning to online video sources such as Joost and Miro for entertainment, Jayanth Angl, senior research analyst at InfoTech, sees streaming media coming to the forefront in the business world in three major areas: broadcast of corporate events, employee training, and live television feeds.
As travel costs continue to escalate, Angl says that assembling remote employees for major company meetings and announcements is unrealistic. Instead, he sees distributed enterprises using video cameras and streaming infrastructure to broadcast events to remote locations. Secondly, Angl says, “a streaming infrastructure can also serve as a scalable and cost-effective platform for distributed enterprises to build and deliver a company-wide training program.” The third, more specialized use of streaming video is the delivery of live television feeds to employees’ desktops, Angl says. For example, he notes that in many industries, such as financial services, public relations, law enforcement, or emergency services, live TV news is an essential source of information.
A final use of streaming media in the enterprise is as a rich form of knowledge sharing, both between employees and to customers. As Chris O’Kennon of Faulkner Information Services points out, “Customer service and support has become an important segment of the streaming media market.” Video clips are increasingly used to explain new product functions, answer frequently asked questions, or provide other forms of self-help.
What You’ll Need
As with just about every application in this Web 2.0 world, Angl says a robust, high-performance IP network is the foundation of any successful streaming media deployment. Video streams consume vast amounts of bandwidth—500 to 1,000Kbps for TV broadcast quality—and are adversely affected by packet delay and jitter. Because degraded network performance can make a video stream unusable, Angl says, “enterprises that have identified a business need for video and are committed to building a streaming infrastructure will need to implement traffic prioritization to ensure optimal quality of service (QoS).” On networks without QoS, some of the newer streaming technologies offer workarounds. Towes points out that Adobe’s Flash player now supports so-called dynamic streaming that can automatically adjust bitrates to avoid the stuttering caused by network congestion.
Given the network’s criticality to a smooth video experience, Angl says IT organizations will need a network management solution capable of real-time traffic monitoring that can diagnose and isolate performance degradation or other network problems. He concludes, “Managing network performance stands as the single biggest challenge for enterprises that are planning to utilize streaming media for internal communications.”
Once the network plumbing is in place, the heart of a streaming media solution is a dedicated server. Most streaming servers run on commodity server hardware, although Angl notes that dedicated hardware appliances are also available for video capture and distribution. He cautions, “Pursuing this route can be expensive, [with prices] typically starting at $4,000 and up to $10,000 per appliance.”
Another element users need to consider when planning a streaming media solution is content generation and capture. Broadcasting a live event is straightforward; essentially all that’s required is a PC with a video capture card, because media servers can encode live feeds on the fly. Towes says that abigger consideration, of particular concern to developers, is the video presentation to users—that is, how clients access the video and the interface’s look and feel. Typically, video is embedded in a Web page with some surrounding controls and information. These so-called Rich Internet Applications are built using various authoring tools and application frameworks. According to Angl, “Selection of a streaming platform will depend heavily on the development skill set of IT resources. [In many cases,] application development teams will likely have significant influence on any decision.”
Content Delivery Networks
Larger, geographically dispersed companies with heavy streaming usage may soon find WAN traffic becoming excessive, with concomitant performance degradation. One potential solution is to offload video delivery to a CDN (content delivery network). While initially designed for public media sites, he notes that CDNs are responding to the growing use of streaming media in the enterprise by developing services tailored to the business environment. Expanding from their roots operating remote media caching sites, Angl says CDNs are transforming themselves into full-service streaming media SaaS providers.
CDNs are still relatively expensive—$1 to $2 per gigabyte transferred—thus, many companies find that operating their own local media caches is more cost-effective.
Streaming media is a rich and engaging communication tool and can serve as a cost-effective replacement for live meetings and classes. Yet with advances in streaming software technology and video capture hardware, it needn’t be an intimidating or expensive project for most IT departments if they have a solid, reliable network with plenty of bandwidth. With streaming servers available at low or no cost and numerous video-editing tools designed for the novice, streaming media is within the reach of any IT department. 
by Kurt Marko
Action Plan
As you seek to put streaming media to work in your enterprise, there are several tips to keep in mind:
• Start with the network: Ensure your network has adequate capacity and headroom to meet added demands of video streams, which can run from 150Kbps (for YouTube quality) to over 1,000Kbps (for TV broadcast quality).
• Consider implementing network QoS on routers and switches, particularly if other real-time applications such as VoIP will be sharing the bandwidth with video streams.
• Deploy network monitoring software that can identify and diagnose real-time performance problems.
• Test a video server. To get a feel for the effect of video streams on your network, stream some sample content from the test server while monitoring network performance for bottlenecks or performance degradation.
• Consult with application developers to see if they have skills in or preference for a particular media application framework.
• Familiarize yourself with basic video authoring and editing products such as Adobe’s Premier suite, Apple Final Cut Pro, Sony Vegas Pro, or similar.
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