Enterprises have relied on the stability and scalability of the multicast protocol for delivering live video inside the enterprise for decades. It has long proven to be an extremely efficient method of reaching large numbers of viewers with a great quality of experience (QoE) while minimizing the impact of bandwidth-intensive media on the corporate network.

The easiest way to think of multicast is to think of your cable box. When you turn on your television, the content is already streaming. When you turn to another channel the content from that channel is right there. You don’t have to wait for it to load. The content is always there, ready to watch. And that same content is available in your neighbor’s house and in the restaurant down the street.

The same is true with multicast. It’s a one-to-many protocol that simultaneously delivers a single stream of content to hundreds or thousands of viewers. For that reason, multicast is highly efficient and gives network administrators predictability over the network.

Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you have a high definition stream with a couple of audio channels and maybe closed captioning, etc. That’s roughly two megabits per second being delivered over the network. If you have 500 people at an enterprise location and they all pull that video without multicast, you have 500 times the two megabits per second coming across the WAN, a recipe for congestion. But, if you send that video out over multicast, no matter whether you have one person watching or 500,000 people watching, it’s still just two megabits per second on the network.

More information about how multicast works and the key features of AltitudeCDN Multicast+ can be found in our white paper Multicast is Alive and Well .

From the IBM webinar Optimizing Video on Corporate Networks

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A big part of video in the enterprise is distribution. How do you optimize video traffic behind the firewall and prevent network congestion? It’s always one of the big challenges for network administrators, getting video to your viewers. Whether that video is coming from an on premises streaming platform or from the cloud, and whether it’s going out to 500, 5,000, or 500,000 viewers inside the enterprise, the network is going to be impacted.

The key role of an eCDN (enterprise content delivery network) is to reduce network strain by decreasing the amount of video that traverses the corporate firewall. The enterprise LAN itself has plenty of bandwidth, but the WAN links and the Internet connections are constrained. So, instead of having 10,000 users all requesting a stream and creating all that traffic across the network, you really want to have discrete streams that just hit a few edge devices.

People talk about common enterprise streaming infrastructure (CESI), so let’s understand what CESI is. Common enterprise streaming infrastructure, first and foremost, is network video infrastructure that will support a variety of protocols, particularly with the move toward HTML5 video. Rather than a using a proprietary distribution solution specific to a single streaming platform, you want one that supports multiple platforms.

Other principles of a CESI are resiliency, scalability, manageability, security and affordability.

Ultimately, when it comes to enterprise video, the network should not be the issue. You should choose the streaming application for the use cases you want to support. And with common enterprise streaming infrastructure, the delivery solution at the network layer will be able to support any and all platforms you choose.

For more information about CESI, check out our white paper Five Considerations for Deploying an Enterprise Content Delivery Network (eCDN).

From the IBM webinar Optimizing Video on Corporate Networks

The post Optimizing Video Behind The Corporate Firewall appeared first on Ramp .

To view our Partner blog, click here