Kollective IQ Analytics: Threshold-Based Alerting
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What is Virtual Event Coaching?
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Network Capacity Planning for Live Video
CMMA BlogWith large numbers of employees still working from home, many enterprises are adopting a video-based culture to aid in corporate communications. What is often missed however is the impact live video can have on your network. This is where network capacity planning comes in.
Network capacity planning helps network administrators understand a network’s shortcomings. Typically, it involves gathering data around:
- Network traffic
- Traffic type
- Utilization rate
- Infrastructure capacity
The purpose of network capacity planning in regard to video is to find out if your network can handle the demand for live and on-demand streaming.
In the last few months, we’ve heard a few justifications for why some organizations have avoided network capacity planning prior to running live events.
“We have plenty of bandwidth. We don’t even have half of our employees back in the office yet.”
“Video will be easy. We’re running a skeleton crew.”
Unfortunately, those arguments don’t hold up in the new normal. Here’s a real-world example from a Kollective customer that explains why.
10% of Employees Can Consume 70% of Network Capacity
A leading agricultural organization recently broadcast a virtual Town Hall Meeting to its globally distributed workforce of 45,000 using a top webcasting platform. Their corporate headquarters, normally alive with more than 5,000 employees, had less than 10% of its staff in office on the day of the event.
With so few employees onsite at HQ, the IT team was confident they could live stream the Town Hall without activating an enterprise content delivery network (ECDN) to optimize bandwidth consumption.
The result? Seventy percent of HQ’s total network capacity was consumed by less than 10% of the workforce.
Given the physical distancing measures required in the workplace, each of those 500 employees participated in the Town Hall from their own computer, pulling the video stream directly from the source instead of gathering to watch in the HQ auditorium. This put immense strain on the network.
If you do the math, that means their network would not be able to support even 15% of employees streaming video from HQ.
What happens when the bulk of employees return to the office?
The Weight of Synchronous Video
The goal for every organization shifting to a video-based culture is to deliver a high-quality viewing experience that is inclusive to all employees, regardless of location, bandwidth or device. Although our customer may have network capacity at Corporate HQ, they also need to address remote office and branch locations that are the most likely to struggle with scaling live and on-demand video.
For context, live events created in Microsoft Stream get a fixed encoding profile:
- 720p – 3.5 mbps
- 540p – 2.2 mbps
- 396p – 1.4 mbps
- 288p – 850 kbps
- 216p – 550 kbps
- 192p – 200 kbps
What’s important to note is that video playback is not a static number and will change according to:
- The video’s original resolution, bitrate and content
- A user’s available bandwidth
- Size of the player
You can estimate the impact video will have on your network by measuring and sampling the bandwidth of the content typically produced by your organization. Extrapolate that out across the total number of employees likely to view said content, and you can see how quickly the bandwidth required to stream video at scale adds up.
How an ECDN Optimizes Bandwidth Consumption
The simplest way to offset live video bandwidth consumption is with an ECDN. Kollective’s ECDN uses WebRTC technology to create a peering mesh between employees in a shared office location. Rather than everyone pulling content directly from the cloud and overwhelming your WAN (wide area network), a single peer gains access to the video and shares it with those nearby.
As you can see, a network without an ECDN is quickly overwhelmed by video – first by live playback and then by employees viewing the event on demand. This can have a dramatic impact not only on the viewing experience but also for business-critical applications that rely on the same network.
With an ECDN those network spikes are eliminated, which means you can be confident live video will not take down your network and the end user will have a high-quality viewing experience.
See How Peering Works
Take the work out of network capacity planning with Kollective’s ECDN. Try our demo today to see how we can help you deliver 100% of video broadcasts at 1% the bandwidth.
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Can Your Network Handle the Demand for Live Video?
CMMA BlogIt was only two months ago IT teams and network operators faced an unprecedented challenge: shifting entire workforces out of the office and into the home. As difficult as that was – rushing to implement collaboration tools, securing networks, etc. – we are again on the precipice of change: employees returning to the workplace.
As someone who works on the technical side, you might be thinking, “Why do I need to be concerned about that? It’s the facilities and HR departments who have to worry about things like social distancing.” Here are a few reasons why it matters to you too:
- Not everyone will return to the office at once, or even for eight hours a day. Instead, this elastic workforce will be splitting their time, which means a continued reliance on videoconferencing platforms like Microsoft Teams to collaborate with peers.
- The demand for video doesn’t stop there. Because the workforce is so widely distributed, corporate communications will continue to lean on live and on-demand video to share important messages at scale.
- The future of work has changed – at least for the time being. Gathering in theaters and auditoriums for CEO Town Halls and All Hands meetings is an outdated practice. Because of social distancing, employees will instead stream Live Events individually from their desks, putting significant strain on your network.
Now, let’s dig into some insights from the Kollective network to add more color to the conversation.
The Rise of Enterprise Video
Each month since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, we’ve been pulling data on how our 135+ Global 2000 customers are using Live Video to communicate with their employees.
- 90% of Kollective customers have used video to address their global organizations on the impact of COVID-19.
- The total number of Live Events broadcast from the Kollective platform jumped over 50% from January to February, stayed roughly the same from February to March and in April, increased another 40% over the previous month.
- From January to February 2020, the average number of Live Events per customer increased 30%. This contrasts with 2019, where there was virtually no change over the same two months. While we saw a slight dip in March 2020, the average number of Live Events increased by 45% in April.
Although I think the results speak for themselves, you may need a little more convincing. Check out these industry-specific charts highlighting the increase in Live Event broadcasts and unique user counts over the last calendar year – video events skyrocketed in Q1 2020.
Understanding the Impact of Video Streaming on Corporate Networks
As Live Video usage in enterprise organizations continues up and to the right, you’re going to see a greater impact on your corporate network. That’s because video is a bandwidth heavy medium and not all networks can handle the demand. Insufficient bandwidth for webcasting generally leads to buffering, jitter and in worst case scenarios, event failure.
For context, Live events created in Stream or “External app or device” produced Live Events from Yammer or Teams will get a fixed encoding profile, according to Microsoft :
- 720p – 3.5 mbps
- 540p – 2.2 mbps
- 396p – 1.4 mbps
- 288p – 850 kbps
- 216p – 550 kbps
- 192p – 200 kbps
What’s important to note is that video playback is not a static number and will change according to:
- The video’s original resolution, bitrate and content
- A user’s available bandwidth
- Size of the player
You can estimate the impact video will have on your network by measuring and sampling the bandwidth of the content typically produced by your organization. Extrapolate that out across the total number of employees likely to view said content, and you can see how quickly the bandwidth required to stream video at scale adds up.
Offset Bandwidth Issues with an ECDN
The quickest, easiest and most cost-effective way to offset the bandwidth constraints caused by video distribution is to add an ECDN to your tech stack. An ECDN is software that allows businesses to deliver content at scale.
Kollective ECDN uses a combination of cloud-based centralized servers and distributed client software to empower organizations to achieve their digital transformation goals. We securely distribute high-quality video content across the enterprise without affecting business critical applications or user experience.
A browser-based peering, platform, also known as P2P, Kollective self-optimizes to learn a network’s topology, creating a mesh between viewing devices and intelligently routing data packets in real-time. By learning how to deliver live streams efficiently, Kollective ECDN ensures that no matter when a video is consumed or shared, bandwidth is automatically preserved.
Join Us for a Webinar: Is Your Network Ready?
If you want to learn more about this topic, I’ll be covering it in depth in Kollective’s new webinar, “Is Your Network Ready?” Join us on June 24th at 9am PST/12pm EST/4pm GMT. For those that can’t make it, an on-demand recording will be available to watch online.
The post Can Your Network Handle the Demand for Live Video? appeared first on Kollective Technology .