When it comes to enterprise video, internal communications teams always begin with the best of intentions. They envision live video being used to connect corporate leaders with offices around the world so the CEO can deliver her vision live instead over email. Or perhaps they envision a vast on-demand library of training videos that staff can use to level up their skills and unleash a wave of innovation that propels the company to new heights.

However, when it comes to success, good intentions are rarely enough. The excitement from launching an enterprise video strategy can quickly peter out if the performance of the video content is merely meh.

In our experience, a poorly-performing video strategy often comes down to three roadblocks: poor content, poor deliverability, or poor insights. For video success, you need to create compelling content, deliver it, and then measure performance so you can continue to improve.

That’s where an analytics platform like Kollective IQ comes in. With Kollective IQ, you can break down the performance of your videos and your network in detail so you can overcome roadblocks to your success.

Roadblock #1: Poor Quality Content

The quality of your content can either be the easiest or the most difficult roadblock to overcome in your path to corporate video success. Quality is subjective. What the CEO might consider a fascinating topic for an all-hands town hall video might be considered painfully dull by the staff. Meanwhile, training materials that are out of date or unengaging may be keeping staff from learning important skills or information, making it at best counterproductive and at worst actively damaging to your business.

While quality is subjective, you can use analytics to at least figure out where you are losing viewers. Kollective IQ lets comms teams look at their video events and on-demand library performance at the individual video level by the minute, helping you understand not only how many people watched the event, but when they stopped watching it.

If you’re noticing staff dropping from an hour-long town hall video after a few minutes, it’s then worth looking at the content itself to see what you can do to make it more engaging. Remember, a video audience is not the same as an in-person audience; where an audience in an auditorium is stuck with a poor presentation, the live video audience is highly distractible, likely has other work open on their screen, and is just a click away from closing the video app altogether.

Similarly, if you notice viewers quitting an on-demand video before the end, it’s worth looking at the spot where you lose viewers to see if the content is too difficult or too simplistic to be worth continuing to watch.

Roadblock #2: Poor Deliverability

The best content in the world is worthless if it doesn’t make it to the viewer or if there’s a poor viewing experience once it gets there.Video is a data-intensive application. When thousands of employees are all watching a live CEO town hall, it has the potential to grind the network to a halt. This not only impacts video performance; it also impacts the deliverability of your other critical business applications and data, compounding the impact of poor network performance.

Comms teams and their IT counterparts can use Kollective IQ to analyze network performance in a number of ways. For example, each video can be looked at to see the buffering time viewers experience while watching the video. A live video with a high amount of buffering indicates a bottleneck in the network that needs to be addressed. By reducing buffering, you’ll be able to improve the viewing experience while improving the deliverability of other business data.

Kollective IQ also helps teams understand the peering efficiency of their video content. The more your content is delivered by a peer instead of by a distribution point, the more you free up the network to deliver other data. A video with low peering efficiency indicates an issue in your network that needs to be fixed.

Roadblock #3: Poor insights

When it comes to analytics, capturing data is key. However, data collection is just the beginning and understanding what the data is trying to tell you is key. When it comes to video analytics, too many solutions only provide basic data about video performance without offering any insight into why it happened or what to do about it.

Kollective IQ’s performance dashboard uses data visualization to serve up instant insights into video performance in real time. If a live video is experiencing poor deliverability, you can know about it and fix it before you lose viewers.

Similarly, you can use your analytics to understand macro-performance of your entire video strategy, drill down into specific videos to review their performance, or even look at individual users to understand who watched what video when and for how long. You can easily set up automatic reports to be delivered to your email, or push the data out to other analytics platforms like Power BI or Tableau to tie video performance to business performance.

Getting the metrics that matter to your team in the right format and at any time has never been easier. Download the Kollective IQ Solutions Brief to learn more about how Kollective IQ can help you overcome enterprise video roadblocks.

When it comes to large, distributed enterprises like retailers or banks, every location has its own data challenges to overcome.

Tier 1 locations, like a global headquarters, can have thousands of employees in one building, while some large corporate campuses may serve 50,000 employees or more. That’s the equivalent of providing IT architecture for a small city, making IT more analogous to a utility than a corporate department. With a large number of employees comes the lion’s share of WAN bandwidth.

Tier 2 locations, on the other hand, get a medium amount of WAN bandwidth to work with. These regional offices can have hundreds of employees–enough to cause a crunch if everyone needs the network at once.

However, it’s at Tier 3 locations where things get dicey. These individual branches each contain a small staff relative to the overall enterprise, which means they only get a sliver of WAN bandwidth. There can be tens of thousands of these small and often remote offices spread throughout the country or even the world, and cumulatively they can require far more bandwidth than they are allotted.

In a traditional network architecture, distribution points are used to serve data to all three tiers. While Tier 1 and 2 may have on-premise distribution points and sufficient bandwidth necessary to keep data flowing, Tier 3 locations often find themselves at the short end of the data stick. That’s because those thousands of Tier 3 locations all have to battle to download data from the same limited, remote distribution points that are located back at a Tier 1 or 2 site. Here’s what that looks like in action:

What happens when all these remote offices try to download an OS deployment, a critical software patch, a live video town hall or on-demand training video from the same distribution point all at the same time? Data gets choked up in overloaded WAN gateways, causing video streams to buffer or fail and software patches from getting to all your endpoints.

While an enterprise can help alleviate the issue by deploying more distribution points, that can be an expensive and time-consuming proposition. The time and money it takes to design, implement, manage and maintain a hardware-based data distribution system can take up a significant portion of your IT budget and staff, leaving little left over of either to put towards more high-value initiatives. Distribution points simply aren’t scalable for the needs of a fast-growing enterprise.

Alternatively, by using a software-based enterprise content delivery network like Kollective you can scale your distribution network in a way that makes sense for both your major Tier 1 and 2 offices and your many Tier 3 locations. By using a peering architecture, endpoints within a location can download data from each other, rather than clogging up the network downloading the same file from a remote distribution point. The result is a 99% reduction in WAN bandwidth, not to mention faster and more reliable delivery of things like live video streams and software patches to even your most remote offices. Here’s the same data as before as delivered via Kollective’s ECDN.

This is a far more effective and efficient way of delivering data. It also allows you to eliminate or redeploy up to 90% of your physical distribution point infrastructure, reducing hardware costs while freeing up IT staff time for more strategic initiatives. Unlike a distribution point-based model, Kollective IQ, Kollective’s analytics platform provides the metrics you need to understand network performance, track the success of your content, and even see precisely who watched a video or which endpoints still require a software patch update.

The great promise of enterprise video and software innovations like Microsoft 365 is improved collaboration. By replacing distribution points with a software-based solution, you can remove a significant obstacle to the flow of data, allowing global headquarters and remote locations alike to work more closely together.

At first glance, the challenges between delivering video content and delivering software content couldn’t be more different.

With video, dropped data packets and network delay can lead to significant performance problems such as stalling and buffering. While these millisecond delays are a non-factor for delivering software patches, for video it can significantly impact the quality of the viewing experience, especially as it places a short but intense demand on your network when your entire company tries to access the same content at the same time.

Software delivery has its own unique challenges. Cloud-based software updates and patches have gone from periodic, planned events to an almost constant occurrence. With the rise of Windows as a Service (WaaS), coupled with the massive damage that can take place from a single unpatched device, IT teams need a way to distribute, install, and verify installation of software across every device on the network before cyber attackers can strike.

While the content types and usages are quite different, in reality, their effect on your network is very similar. At the end of the day, bits are bits. A true enterprise content delivery network (ECDN) should be content agnostic, capable of optimizing the delivery of video data, software data, IoT data, or anything else you can think of.

Let’s look at how that works in practice. Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), frequently referred to as Config Manager, is the most common enterprise software management tool used today. But SCCM doesn’t deliver the content; it only manages the delivery.

Similarly, in the video world a front-end webcasting, a tool like Microsoft Teams live event is used to create and send out live video broadcasts to employees across the network. But Teams needs an additional technology to distribute the content to all employees.

In the video world, hardware-based multicast servers can be used to deliver live streaming content. In the software delivery world, companies use servers known as distribution points to deliver software updates and patches. In many ways, multicast servers and distribution points experience the same drawbacks. They can be expensive to purchase, time-consuming to provision, difficult to maintain, and lack real flexibility for dynamic networks.

That’s where an ECDN comes in. In both cases, an ECDN, like Kollective acts as the pipeline to deliver the content. Our distribution platform intelligently leverages your existing network infrastructure to deliver content faster, more reliably, and with less bandwidth through smart peering, no matter if its video content or a software update.

An ECDN is faster, better, and far more cost-effective than delivering content via hardware, but performance is only the beginning. Even if you chose to duplicate the content delivery performance using hardware, keep in mind that multicast servers and software distribution servers are virtually a “black box” when it comes to providing insightful analytics. You have no way of understanding how your video performed or if all your devices have received the most recent patch.

With Kollective ECDN, we collect actionable data about the performance of your network, your content, and your devices. Kollective IQ, our analytics platform, can tell you about potential bottlenecks within your network and provide you with insights into efficiency and engagement, looking at your entire network at the device level to see if all your endpoints are patched or exactly how many people watched your last CEO town hall event. The platform uses this data to self-optimize while giving you the insights you need to get more return on your network infrastructure and content investment, all in real-time.

With Kollective, one platform can provide multiple solutions for your content delivery needs, be it video or software. Learn more about our ECDN platform .