Happy Monday! I usually make it a Multicast Monday, but
today I’m interrupting regularly scheduled programming to share a few
highlights from my trip to Boston.

Last week, the Ramp team headed to Brightcove PLAY, an event focused on video strategy and technology. I had an opportunity to meet our customers and partners, as well as spend time with my colleagues—many of whom I hadn’t met in person. It was a great week, and I have so much to share, but I’ll do my best to keep it brief (a challenge for sure!).

Tuesday

Early Tuesday morning, we made our way to our headquarters in downtown Boston to take in a few meetings and put the finishing touches on our demo for Brightcove PLAY. Late afternoon, we prepared for and attended the official Welcome Reception in the exhibit hall, a.k.a. the Playground.

Wednesday

After an exciting opening keynote, one of our many Ramp/Brightcove customers Jason Hollingsworth from SAS Institute talked about how his team is delivering business outcomes and reducing the cost and complexity of enterprise-wide video. Meanwhile, the Ramp team shared how AltitudeCDN Multicast+ and OmniCache can save both money and bandwidth for organizations using live and on-demand video internally.

Thursday

“It’s a good day when you don’t hear from IT during a live CEO broadcast,” said Johnathan Eshleman, SAS Institute, during the Level Up Lunch (pictured on the right). SAS Institute’s success is the result of a number of factors: executive sponsorship, an innovative team, and great technology (Brightcove and Ramp).

Bamidele Olaniran from International Monetary Fund (left) shared how Ramp’s AltitudeCDN Multicast+ delivers multicast streams from Brightcove Video Cloud to employees watching live events taking place around the world during an afternoon session, titled “From 50 to 50K: Delivering High-Quality Video Experiences at Scale.”

Friday

Before heading home, I asked a few of my colleagues the most common questions we hear from our customers on camera. We’ll be sharing those videos with you soon.

All in all, it was an awesome week. Thanks to our friends at Brightcove, SAS Institute, International Monetary Fund—and last but not least—the Ramp team for making Brightcove PLAY such a huge success!

The post Brightcove PLAY Rewind appeared first on Ramp .

To view our Partner blog, click here

By Julie Basa

Happy Multicast Monday!  I had an exceptional weekend. My daughter graduated from the University of North Texas, and I am so proud (Caw caw!).

I vividly remember having “all the feels” the day I
graduated. I was happy, sad, confident, unsure, excited and scared all at once.
You could say I was suffering from fear of the unknown.

I realize launching your next CEO webcast isn’t quite the same as graduating from college, but not knowing what will happen is the worst (especially for a control freak like me!). How will the webcast impact the network? Will everyone be able to watch without buffering—including the CIO who is in London this week?  Will the video stream slow down point-of-sale systems? 

The good news is you have control over the quality of your
next webcast. With AltitudeCDN
Multicast+ Silent Testing , you can run an event simulation to test
the performance of your environment and verify your infrastructure is properly
configured before your next event.

Simulations also are more efficient, flexible and reliable
than conducting live event trials with actual viewers. Recruiting enough people
for live tests is complex and often produces inconclusive results, mostly
because participation rates create large blind spots in test coverage. 

With Multicast+, administrators can create and schedule simulated, fully-functional video events that instruct participating Multicast+ senders to notify Multicast+ receivers to join the event for a specified period of time. The receivers gather information, then return event-related statistics viewable via the AltitudeCDN Altimeter management system.

Click here
to learn more about Multicast+ , and if you’ll be at
Brightcove PLAY this week, stop by our demonstration and say “Hi!” I’ll be the
one with a big grin and bags under my eyes from a weekend of celebration. 

The post Multicast Monday:
Fear of the Unknown appeared first on Ramp .

To view our Partner blog, click here

By: Julie Basa

Happy
Multicast Monday! Next week, we’re heading to Brightcove PLAY in Boston, an event focused
on video strategy and technology. So, it’s the the perfect time to talk a
little about AltitudeCDN
Multicast+’s
ability to work with the largest number of video players on the market today.

We know
demand for business video is on the rise. Yet, the type of video platform you
need for global learning and development programs may not work for all-employee
webcasts, executive communications or digital displays in retail locations.
Like most, you probably have more than one platform.

How do you deliver the highest quality video and protect your network from bandwidth-intensive video? An enterprise content delivery network (eCDN), a network overlay to optimize video at the infrastructure level, can solve these challenges, but deploying and managing eCDNs for each streaming platform is an IT nightmare— and fortunately unnecessary.

Some video
platform providers offer multicasting as part of their solution, but most of
those are proprietary and work only with their platforms. AltitudeCDN Multicast+ is the only vendor
neutral multicast solution for HLS and DASH. Multicast+ supports any live HTML5
video stream, can generate HLS from encoders supporting RTP, or be combined
with a media server such as Wowza Streaming Engine to ensure complete coverage
from a single enterprise delivery solution.

Multicast+
is also integrated with a number of enterprise streaming solutions, including Microsoft
and Brightcove , which is as simple as
changing a single setting during the set-up process.

Ramp’s
solutions prove an eCDN can and should be able to retrieve and redistribute
video from any video source. Not only does this simplify the deployment and
management of the eCDN, but it provides maximum flexibility for the future as
the enterprise video landscape evolves over time.

Learn more about the benefits of AltitudeCDN Multicast+: The Next-Generation Multicast in the Age of HTML5 .

Heading
to Brightcove PLAY?

• Experience
  AltitudeCDN in Ramp’s booth
• “Level
  Up @ Lunch” with SAS Institute on Thursday at 11:45 a.m.
• “From
  50 to 50K: Delivering High Quality Video Experiences at Scale” with
  International Monetary Fund on Thursday at 1 p.m.
• Schedule a meeting

Want to go? Use our discount code: PLAYRAMP

The post Multicast Monday:
Integration Matters appeared first on Ramp .

To view our Partner blog, click here

By: Julie Basa

It’s that time again… Multicast Monday! I just wrapped up my third week at Ramp. It was a great week, and I continue to learn so much. Our customer SAS Institute joined us and Wainhouse Research for a webinar to talk about how they’re saving their network from the increasing demand for internal videos. If you missed it, you can watch the replay here .

The team really
thought of everything when they built Ramp’s enterprise content management
network (eCDN) solutions. In my first blog, I told you about AltitudeCDN Multicast+’s software-defined
networking, security and its ability to work with virtually any video player,
and on April 15 , I talked about its
unparalleled quality and efficiency.

So, this week I thought I’d dive a little deeper to find out what’s so special about our “bandwidth smoothing technologies.” Turns out, we’ve got some really smart developers.   

Forward
Error Correction

Forward
error correction—or FEC—is Ramp’s patented method for managing a momentary loss
of data. Multicast+ encodes audio and visual bits by organizing them into
two-dimensional blocks. The blocks contain forward- and backward-predictive
information, helping the decoder reconstruct lost packets. You might be
thinking other solutions do the same thing, but we take it two steps further.

Ramp’s FEC uses data
from longer periods of time than other solutions, so each block contains more
information. Then, we rotate the blocks 90 degrees, so data lost equates to
small chunks from several groups of bits rather than large chunks from a single
set of bits. As a result, packets can be almost fully reconstructed when they
arrive at the decoder.

Heartbeat Monitoring

Imagine
what would happen if your multicast server failed. All of a sudden, your
network would be flooded with individual streams. For the sake of simple math,
if 10,000 people are watching your live stream, you’d have approximately 20,000
mbps of data travelling your network all at once.*

With Multicast+,
you can deploy a high-availability cluster of senders and establish a heartbeat
communication between them. When a missed heartbeat is detected, the functional
sender with the highest priority immediately takes over as the active sender.
This backend process is so transparent to viewers, they won’t even notice.

Ramp’s forward
error correction and heartbeat monitoring are just two ways Multicast+ is one
of the most reliable eCDNs on the market today—even on wireless networks.

Do you
want to learn more about Ramp’s bandwidth-smoothing technologies? Get the details on Multicast+
here
or contact us today!

*For this calculation, we’re assuming one video stream is equal to 2mbps.

The post Multicast Monday:
Bandwidth Smoothing Technologies appeared first on Ramp .

To view our Partner blog, click here

It’s time to stop worrying about your network and focus 100%
on your message.

With Ramp AltitudeCDN and Brightcove ,
you can break through poor quality of experience (QoE) and resolve network
congestion caused by bandwidth-consuming video. Using Ramp’s
Brightcove-certified plugins for OmniCache and Multicast+ ,
integration is a simple, one-time process.  

Come see us in the Exhibit Hall, schedule a meeting, and hear how our customers are making the Ramp/Brightcove integration work in “From 50 to 50K: Delivering High Quality Video Experiences at Scale” on Thursday, May 16 at 1 p.m. ET.

Want
to learn more? Meet with us at Brightcove PLAY.

Want
to go to Brightcove PLAY? Use our 20% off discount code: PLAYRAMP

The post Break Through Network Congestion appeared first on Ramp .

To view our Partner blog, click here

By: Julie Basa

It’s Multicast Monday! It’s also Tax Day, and if you
haven’t filed yet, you might be in a panic. I promised myself I wasn’t going to
wait until the last minute, and I was successful (we did them last weekend!).

Do you feel a similar panic before company meetings? Live video
streaming is a great way to reach your entire organization, but when it’s slow,
stopped or buffering during a CEO town hall, it can be frustrating for viewers
and embarrassing for execs. And I can tell you from experience, the last thing
you want is an email from your CEO saying, “I heard people couldn’t join my
meeting. What happened?”

Although there are many variables to a great webcast, I’ve
got a hot tip: Use an enterprise content delivery network (eCDN) to minimize
the impact video has on your network. Which eCDN will work for you depends on
your enterprise (read
Video Distribution Behind the Firewall ), but multicast is one of the
most trusted and reliable eCDNs around.

So, how can you prevent pre-live stream panic? Consider AltitudeCDN Multicast+ —it’s the ultimate webcasting chill pill. Multicast+ has an event simulation feature that allows you to silently test the end-to-end performance of your Multicast+ environment and quality of experience (QoE).

Instead of coordinating a live test with people in different offices and geographies, you can create and schedule a fully-functional simulation to verify the performance of your network. With every simulation, you get detailed analytics, allowing you to make adjustments before the live event with your CEO. Watch the video below to learn more.

Multicast+ also has bandwidth-smoothing technologies built into its software. We’ll dive into those next week, and if you want to hear straight from our customers, join us on April 24 at 1 p.m. ET for a webinar to learn how to “Prepare Your Nework for the Business Video Wave.”

Make it a great Monday (and good luck on those taxes)!

The post Multicast Monday:
Prevent (Live Stream) Panic appeared first on Ramp .

To view our Partner blog, click here