What are the best transport protocols for an HTML5 only environment—MPEG-TS, Apple HLS, or DASH? Let’s talk a little bit about that.

This is really a great question that we get all the time. When we talk to IT organizations or CIOs we hear, “Well, I know I’m going to have an HTML5 video, but what is it that I want to use for a transport? What’s the protocol we’re going to be using?”

The nice thing about having an HTML5 strategy is it supports all of these protocols. And frankly, it’s going to be the platform you choose that will determine what the protocol is going to be. So, for example, if you’re using Microsoft Stream or Teams or Skype for Business, it’s going to be DASH. You can be using any number of other providers, and they may choose to use DASH. Others, like MediaPlatform, will use HLS.

So, when committing to an HTML5 environment, you want to choose an underlying eCDN, common enterprise streaming infrastructure, that will support all the HTML5 transport protocols. That way you can deploy your delivery infrastructure once then not worry anymore about the protocol your platforms support.

From the Streaming Media webinar Content Delivery Challenges in a New Era.

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Let’s talk a little bit about quality of experience for a moment. What are the best ways organizations can monitor, analyze, and improve the quality of experience for viewers behind the firewall?

Oftentimes, enterprises have plenty of bandwidth on the corporate network for a great quality of service, but the experience breaks down at the pipe getting the video stream from the cloud into the enterprise. Companies deploy some type of enterprise content delivery network (eCDN), whether it is a multicast solution or an intelligent caching solution, to alleviate that congestion at the internet connection and even on the wide area network.

But, unless you are truly measuring the quality of the experience and the quality of service for video delivery, you are kind of just working in the dark. In the enterprise it is really important to have measurable, quantifiable metrics of success. To gather those metrics you need robust diagnostic data and analytics available as part of your video deployment. You need to be able to tell if viewers are experiencing too much buffering. You need to know if fail-over scenarios are being activated due to network issues. You need to know what is really going on, both at the video level and also at the network level.

Network diagnostics, especially with live broadcasting, need to support two main use cases. The first is real-time troubleshooting. Can you identify if any subnets are having issues on a global network fast enough to be able to respond? The second use case is after the fact analysis, assessing an event as a whole and looking to see what can be improved in your delivery strategy.

From the Streaming Media webinar Content Delivery Challenges in a New Era.

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Many companies are using multiple streaming platforms to support their video communications. How does that impact the enterprise content delivery strategy, and what are some recommendations for dealing with that sort of situation?

When enterprises are looking at streaming platforms, typically they have different buyers with different use cases selecting the platforms. What corporate communications may need from an application for CEO broadcasts may be very different from what the HR or learning and development department needs for training and compliance programs.

Industry research consistently shows more than two thirds of enterprises have more than one streaming platform deployed. So by definition, you want to have something that’s going to work for more than one platform. Be careful not to deploy infrastructure for an application. Remember delivery solutions are part of your network infrastructure, so you want to choose something that’s going to be part of the fabric of the network and support the different streaming protocols, not an application per se.

By choosing common enterprise streaming infrastructure, you will get something that is going to run across the board. It will work with all the streaming applications in use, and even many of the unified communications platforms.

From the Streaming Media webinar Content Delivery Challenges in a New Era.

The post Enterprise Video Delivery from Multiple Platforms appeared first on Ramp .

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Why is it important to have a device-agnostic content strategy, particularly for streaming in the enterprise?

The more enterprise communicators use and rely on video, the bigger and more diverse their audiences are bound to become. Even with enterprise standards, variety in the viewing devices audiences use are inevitable. From different operating systems to different types of computing devices, including the plethora of mobile devices and laptops, even to thin clients such as those from Citrix, the number of devices viewers want to use can quickly add up.

Having a content delivery strategy that is agnostic to the type of device—one that is neutral to those types of devices—not only simplifies support, but also allows viewers to receive the message regardless of the environment they happen to be in. They can move from one environment to another and the device they use doesn’t necessarily have to be tied to the environment they are in. The device can go from office to office, to VPN access and home access, et cetera, and still be able to access the video stream—whether it be a live broadcast or video on demand such as training and compliance videos.

From the Streaming Media webinar Content Delivery Challenges in a New Era.

The post Why It’s Important To Have a Device-Agnostic Video Content Strategy appeared first on Ramp .

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How do you deal with the diverse networks you encounter in the enterprise when you’re architecting a delivery strategy?

The first step is you need to understand the existing landscape in tbe enterprise, a sort of audit, if you will, of what’s there and where you want to get to in terms of the video delivery. For instance, do you have existing infrastructure you want to leverage? We have some customers that have been multicasting since the Windows Media days, and they want to continue to leverage those investments. That’s where Ramp and the HTML5 multicasting shine. So that’s the first big piece, understanding where you are today and where you want to go.

Next is the organizational structure of the network group, the IT department, if you will. Some of those departments are very strong on desktop management and so very comfortable deploying agents that might help with multicasting or peer-to-peer delivery. IT departments in other companies may be far more comfortable with server management and would prefer to manage servers that do edge caching, things like that. So, the culture of your company is important.

And then when it comes to solutions and where you want to get to, you really need to build in flexibility—support for a wide variety of video formats, the ability to distribute video to a wide variety of locations, and the flexibility to fail over, even between formats, as a part of your video strategy. Your strategy needs to be able to scale. You might open a new office or do an acquisition, and you need to have flexibility both horizontally across the network as well as vertically within each location.

It’s not uncommon to have a lot of diversity within a corporate network. Most enterprises use a combination of different types of delivery mechanisms that work together as a common streaming infrastructure . For example, you can have multicast for those people who are on a multicast-enabled part of the network. Then you can have an intelligent caching solution for those individuals that are not on multicast or for viewing devices on which you need to avoid installing software. Or maybe you have some viewers on a Citrix environment using thin clients. You are most flexible when your strategy supports diversity—viewing devices, delivery protocols, access locations, and streaming platforms—both today and in the future.

From the Streaming Media webinar Content Delivery Challenges in a New Era.

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