(This article originally appeared in the 2005 Streaming Media Industry Sourcebook)

You’ve heard it all before: streaming audio and video combined with rich media offer enterprises the ability to increase the effectiveness of their communications efforts, from rich media corporate content to live Webcasts to distance education. Even if streaming media still isn’t considered a mission-critical IT priority in this era of enterprise cost-cutting, more and more companies are becoming convinced of streaming’s ROI and are investing in video communications.

Many executives are just now starting to discover streaming’s potential to improve communications and save them money, a realization all too often spurred by the fact that their video delivery capabilities are being exceeded by demand. Enterprises—defined here as Fortune 500-level companies—are becoming hard-pressed to find cost-effective solutions to address this scenario so they don’t end up giving employees “bandwidth exceeded” errors instead of critical communications. IT and business managers must therefore re-evaluate their options and approaches for communicating with employees, sales forces, customers, partners, and investors.

Companies are finding the power of video is not in limited communications or Web conferencing, but rather in communication that can reach hundreds or thousands of viewers at their convenience. An executive’s video explanation of a recent ethics and compliance mandate, for example, leaves a much more powerful impression than an email summary. Furthermore, statistics show that other business applications such as Web conferencing, Webcasting, elearning, and virtual collaboration can be leveraged with the right strategic planning.

Streaming media no longer needs to prove itself. The questions now are how can it be leveraged and integrated with other technologies for internal and external use, and how can it be successfully implemented within the enterprise network? As the demand for rich-media content continues to increase, corporations need to put an infrastructure in place that can deliver content on a global scale without sacrificing quality or availability. The current state of infrastructure and streaming technologies, combined with content management and publishing solutions, enables efficient rich media deployments, higher ROI, and minimal impact on IT.

Why Expand?

The numbers speak for themselves. A 2004 Aberdeen study revealed roughly 66% of enterprise-level companies are using streaming media business applications at least two to three times a week. And by 2006, Gartner Inc. predicts that 80% of enterprises will be “dependent on streaming media applications for supporting internal corporate communications and training.”

Visual communications are significantly more effective than written correspondence or voice-only communications. Video, whether in the form of conferencing, Webcasts, or on-demand presentations, conveys information through visual cues that improve the accuracy of the communication by relaying intent, purpose, and sentiment while simultaneously providing greater retention. It offers many of the benefits of live interactions without the need for travel, dramatically improving productivity and lowering costs.

Strategic Planning

As enterprises look to enhance their infrastructure to a “stream-ready” state, it’s a good idea to start with some strategic planning and focus on how to leverage various video requirements into an integrated streaming solution. Almost anything is possible, so consider what you want to do. For example:

• Can you create streaming content easily?
• Can you record your videoconferencing output and stream it on demand afterwards?
• Can you archive your live Webcasts?
• Can you leverage the distribution of content over a content delivery network (CDN) easily and cost-effectively?
• Can you report on viewer activity?
• Are the tape and digital formats compatible between production and post-production crews, and is transfer time minimal between the two groups?

Over the years, countless companies, products, applications, and services have emerged on the video communications landscape. Organizations face difficult decisions about which technologies and applications are right for them, and more importantly, how to make them all work together. In the end, many of these companies find they have implemented disparate systems, from multiple vendors, that are redundant, expensive to own, incompatible, and—perhaps most disappointing—still don’t reach everyone in the organization. As a result, the transforming power of video communications is still not realized, and organizations are left to wonder what failed in their strategy, and what the remedy might be.

With a strategic planning approach before implementation, each video system is acquired not just for how it will solve a specific business problem today, but also for its ability to work with future video investments. Such planning builds on earlier investments by leveraging open and de facto industry standards. StarBak Communications, as an example, offers an integrated network video approach that converges disparate video applications onto enterprise IP networks including videoconferencing, streaming, live Webcasting, satellite, and cable. This type of approach allows enterprises to leverage various video business applications with existing investments—with huge cost-saving implications.

What is a “Stream-Ready” State?

So what exactly is a “stream-ready” state? Think of it from a business perspective. It correlates to requirements for a typical corporate streaming initiative. For one Fortune 500 energy company with more than 119,000 employees in 145 countries, streaming content effectively has become paramount to quickly disseminating information globally.

Therefore, having a streaming infrastructure that won’t interfere with business-critical applications, yet provides adequate capabilities to stream corporate content, has become vital. In our case, we defined a stream-ready state by these criteria (while the number of potential viewers in your enterprise might be different, the other criteria apply regardless of enterprise size):

• Provide sufficient functionality to reach hundreds of thousands of employees through live, on-demand, and “push” video broadcasting
• Deliver video globally without requiring expensive network upgrades or impacting country network capacities
• Provide both broadband and narrowband content
• Enable employees with varying skills to publish streaming presentations yet maintain IT control
• Keep cost per live and on-demand events low
• Control access rights for targeted secure viewing
• Provide the capability to protect sensitive corporate information by leveraging digital rights management technology and existing directory services
• Provide usage information and reporting metrics

Expanding Existing Infrastructure

As an enterprise looks to increase streaming capacity, there are four common methods of expanding infrastructure for streaming media. Internally, a company can choose hardware-based multicasting, software-based grid delivery, and hardware-based caching devices. Externally, there’s outsourcing delivery to a secure CDN, thus bypassing the internal network worry completely. The strategic objectives served by these various options are to cut WAN load, increase start-up speed, localize delivery, centralize management, and provide user monitoring, to name a few.

Single-Site Streaming

On the simple end, where there’s only one location with significant LAN bandwidth, a single streaming server can be enhanced with multiple or faster network cards and the server connected to the core backbone. Resources used on a streaming server are relatively low, and many concurrent sessions can be supported.

Multi-Site Software Streaming

Where increased usage occurs in a location remote from the streaming server, the problem lies in aggregate use of the wide-area bandwidth. Enterprises tend to purchase bandwidth based on average usage and a proportion of “head room,” rather than coping with the often-temporary peaks caused by bandwidth-hungry video.

As noted previously, many enterprises are hitting a ceiling with their current bandwidth limitations and must look for ways to expand their concurrent user limits, possibly moving into live communications. Multicasting is beneficial for live events where one copy of a stream leaves the streaming server and is replicated throughout the components in the network infrastructure. Large numbers of concurrent users are possible without drain on the network. Given modern network equipment, enabling multicasting on a network can simply be a task of planning and configuration rather than further capital investment.

The latest way of increasing streaming capacity is utilizing the mass of idle PCs on a network in a method called grid-delivery multicasting, as found in offerings from the likes of Abacast and Kontiki. Grid-delivery multicasting provides a cost-effective solution by allowing companies to take advantage of existing computing and network capacity to deliver digital content. Distribution starts at one central server, but each user’s PC that receives the file can become a server and service other requests on the network. After one user receives a file, subsequent requests for the file on that LAN would be served locally from previous recipients, preserving WAN bandwidth.

Multi-Site Hardware Caching

More straightforward is the deployment of caching devices at the remote locations. These can be configured to store and serve content locally, caching the first viewer’s stream for local delivery to subsequent viewers or creating multiple local copies of an incoming live stream. This is the approach used by most of the bigger CDNs.

For the enterprise, however, this requires the purchase and maintenance of a network of extra boxes. This method also presents a challenge when updating versions of existing content, because it takes time for the updated content to propagate throughout the caching network. However, many larger companies already utilize a caching infrastructure for software distribution. With some strategic planning, this existing infrastructure could easily and cost-effectively become stream-ready.

Outsourced Content Delivery Networks

The last option is simply to outsource streaming to a secure CDN. These vendors have extensive global networks, some using physical servers around the world and others utilizing peer-to-peer arrangements, which can easily handle live and on-demand streaming to a huge amount of concurrent users. CDNs also have a high degree of built-in redundancy that increases delivery reliability. Furthermore, the management portals of such vendors typically provide easy access to extensive usage reports in order to better understand viewer behavior.

To take advantage of the CDN’s vast infrastructure, the enterprise must have Internet entry points at its many locations that query the CDN directly, enabling the CDN vendors to allocate its optimal resources. Many large global companies use Internet hub access points at key locations, which creates a bottleneck that unfortunately defeats the purpose of using the CDN. Hardware caching may then be the better option.

Regardless of which expansion strategy you choose, don’t forget about another critical component: a solid content creation tool. Creating content should be easy for the average business publisher. It should also minimize or eliminate IT involvement, and be cost-effective—using installed videoconferencing equipment, for example. There are many content-creation tools on the market with varying levels of functionality such as Accordent’s PresenterPlus and Sonic Foundry’s MediaSite Live, as well as others like Media Publisher, Inc.’s Media Publisher, which encompasses a centralized management platform for all video communication technologies. All these tools put a user-friendly front-end to creating rich media as well as providing the content management and publishing element.

When to Outsource

A common question facing enterprises today is when to outsource to an external CDN. An organization should weigh costs against capabilities, including the CDN’s global presence. For on-demand content, the answer can be as soon as your budget can support the minimum monthly CDN charge, either through cost avoidance or through added streaming revenue. Several other factors might indicate that it’s time to outsource:

• Internal costs for everything (software, hardware, management, operations) exceed external costs
• You need to start up quickly (turning it on overnight)
• There are many unknowns about audience size, access time, etc.
• You don’t want to deal with the infrastructure

In terms of complexity, downloadable clips on Web servers are the simplest implementation, though not always successful for delivering quality content to remote offices. Streaming content delivered from a streaming server or servers is the next step. Then there’s adding an interactive Web interface. The most difficult is a global live Webcast. Which implementation is right depends on the type of content, the audience size, and the location(s). On-demand content with little traffic easily can be handled in-house. Add substantial traffic and concurrent users to the equation—i.e., a company-wide announcement or a live broadcast—and it becomes more feasible, and perhaps even necessary, to outsource to a CDN.

On-demand video gives you plenty of time to bring audio/video of marginal quality up to the required level and to prepare a media presentation for delivery. Non-linear editing systems are used to capture and edit the raw inputs, and encoding software (and sometimes additional hardware) is subsequently used to convert the inputs to streaming formats. Interactive features such as slide/URL flips, chapters, chat windows, and polling can be implemented to provide a custom presentation. The creation of interactive presentations spans many disciplines and can be daunting to the average IT person. Sometimes there are key individuals with a multimedia/streaming background who can create these types of presentations in-house. If not, this can be outsourced as well.

Live Webcasting, on the other hand, can be quite stressful. These broadcasts typically require a video production crew with a switcher for the multi-camera inputs, integrated titling and character generation, as well as a streaming team to take their feed, pre-process it, encode it, and distribute it into the network. Multiple encoders are needed to provide redundancy. Encoder settings must be set correctly and tested beforehand, as you only get one shot at a live event. Therefore, many companies outsource live events to rely on the pros to get it done right.

If an event absolutely has to be live, outsourcing to a CDN is the obvious choice unless your network is stream-ready. The $64,000 question is, does it really have to be live? If your company is global, many employees won’t be able to view the live event because of varying time zones. Taping the event, creating the presentation, and then staggering announcements to smaller groups can dramatically decrease the number of concurrent users, making it possible to stream in-house. In some instances this isn’t feasible and, again, outsourcing to a CDN is the best option.

Other instances of outsourcing may include video production crews for professional results (i.e., lighting, cameras, audio). Capabilities may not be available in-house for capture, pre-processing, editing, encoding, and integration into a Web-based presentation. All of these can be outsourced individually or to a streaming media production firm.

What you outsource obviously depends on what facilities and skills are available in-house. Some companies may have a stream-ready network and a studio/set with great cameras and lighting. Others may have skilled post-production artists that can take a master tape and turn it into a slick presentation but need a CDN to deliver it. Others may need to outsource it all.

Metrics and Measurement

Determining the reliability and quality of streams is vital to any enterprise deploying a streaming media system. CDNs provide usage reports that indicate how long it takes for a stream to start, average viewing and connection speeds, and the relative popularity of various media streams.

If they’re not using a CDN, enterprises need some sort of an information collection and reporting system for their streaming activity. Typically they go the manual route, assigning an IT person to pull the streaming server log files and manually create graphs or charts for visual statistics. This is a tedious task, and interpreting these stats can be a challenge (i.e., the proxy servers). Currently, there are few off-the-shelf solutions to address this—Sane Solutions’ NetTracker being one—indicating a gap in the industry.

CDN providers such as Speedera and Akamai, as well as third parties such as Keynote, have created advanced metrics packages to produce in-depth business analysis reports that enable enterprises to evaluate the effectiveness of their services, monitor and report on audience traffic, and accurately bill advertisers and content owners. Regardless of the approach—internal, third-party, or CDN—usage metrics are an essential tool for evaluating the effectiveness of their streams and delivering ROI.

Conclusion

Streaming media has been around for more than a decade now and no longer has to prove its value. Statistics show it is being used and consumed on a broad and ever-expanding scale. In today’s business climate of globalization, cutbacks, and offshoring, a streaming initiative can provide substantial value in faster time-to-market for products/services, cost-effective training applications and regulatory compliance, and higher productivity, to name just a few benefits.

The key challenge facing enterprises, then, is to reach a stream-ready state. Every instance will be different based on current network capability, in-house skills, and particular streaming requirements. In the interest of cost savings, more effective communications, and leveraged business applications, executives should consider allowing their in-house experts or external systems integrators to evaluate the state of their streaming capabilities and create a roadmap to a stream-ready infrastructure. If not, they’ll be far behind their competitors and will be spending more for less.