gds international - enterprise videos secret problem distribution and how to solve it
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The world was a stage in Shakespeare's time; now, it's a video screen. Consumers enjoy entertainment virtually anywhere they go. Businesses communicate with their customers. But the constant is video — one of the most powerful forms of communication. It's become a video world. That's why companies are moving to communicate with their employees in video. Make the shift and you can better motivate them. Put it off and watch competitors eventually leave you behind.TRANSCRIPT
Enterprise Video's Secret Problem, Distribution, and How to Solve it
A framework for delivering consumer-‐grade video with enterprise-‐level efficiency.
Table of Contents:
No Video Is No Solution
IT’s Video Problem
Finding a Video Solution
Solution Strategies
Building a Solution
Summary
Introduction
The world was a stage in Shakespeare's time; now, it's a video screen. Consumers enjoy entertainment virtually anywhere they go. Businesses communicate with their customers. But the constant is video — one of the most powerful forms of communication.
It's become a video world. That's why companies are moving to communicate with their employees in video. Make the shift and you can better motivate them. Put it off and watch competitors eventually leave you behind.
But most large companies have an enterprise video problem. No, it's not employees spending too much time on YouTube and Netflix. Corporations have an enterprise video delivery problem.
There's rapid growth in executive and employee demand for video produced in-‐house and used to communicate with workers. Video for training, employee orientation, management addressing the rank-‐and-‐file, and general corporate communications might be transmitted on demand when requested by employees. It might be streamed similar to broadcast, so that many employees can watch simultaneously. Companies can push video in the background to employees — or use combinations of these video types.
Unfortunately, corporate networks were never designed for this type of traffic. The combination of content and an antiquated delivery system can play havoc with all the other functions the network must perform. Companies have an enterprise video distribution problem.
There is no easy single solution, but there are ways that enterprise IT departments can address the problem and deliver the video that executives want — along with all the other traffic that the business needs. The information you'll find in this e-‐book will help outline the various solutions and the circumstances under which they can be most appropriate.
No Video Is No Solution
“Just say no” went out in the 1980s for a good reason: It doesn't work. CIOs can't stop the video wave any more than they could stop email, instant messaging, or social networks. And why would they with the potential productivity gains? Video is a tremendously powerful form of communication. It involves both audio and visuals to expand how people can relate to the message that the video communicates. People can use voice tone and body language to communicate subtleties and emotional inflection that are completely lost in emails, memos and other forms of communication.
The video habit starts in the personal lives of employees, as people are used to watching videos for entertainment or information. According to the Nielsen Company, U.S. males between 18 and 49 watch nearly 140 hours of television, seven hours of online video on computers, and 4.3 hours of video on mobile device video per month. Females watch 151 hours, five hours, and 4.3 hours, respectively. Even though there are some differences in devices used by age — for example, 18-‐ to 34-‐year-‐olds do half of mobile viewing — the inclination to watch video is ingrained.
Such ingrained habits don't stay home when people go to work. Furthermore, with the advances in digital video-‐camera technology and nonlinear editing software, in-‐house production is within the reach of any company, and many are taking advantage of the fact. According to the 2011 Enterprise Web Communications Survey conducted by Interactive Media Strategies, a third of all companies
that responded said that they already produced a video per week, and two-‐thirds will increase video production this coming year. That is why video is in the enterprise to stay.
Corporate Video Uses
• All-‐Hands Meetings • Change and Crisis Management • Company News Channel • Divisional and Functional Updates • Employee Onboarding and Development • Employee Sharing, Collaboration • Enterprise TV • Digital Signage • Retail Store Advertising • Security Monitoring • Training
IT's Video Problem
IT has a problem with distribution because all that video gets delivered to the employees through the company's network infrastructure. That's where things get sticky. Video may be just another form of digital information, but it differs significantly from the other types that a corporation uses, and that is the root of the difficulties that IT faces from the onset of enterprise video.
Most digital information in a corporation is relatively brief and contained. Documents may be measured in the tens of kilobytes to the tens of megabytes. But no matter how large the image, database query or word processing file is, a network can neatly slice it up into packets and send it along to the appropriate destination. If the packets get interleaved with others on the network, that is fine. By the time the document is reassembled, the user doesn't notice, and with a well-‐designed network, there is plenty of bandwidth to move all the information.
Video Deluge Video, however, is different. The amount of information recorded is large, leading to sizable files, even with standard compression techniques, such as VC-‐1 and H.264. The higher the quality video desired, the larger the file. Conversely, heavier compression degrades the video experience, which can lead to dissatisfied users and executives, and dashed corporate objectives.
In addition to the size, video differs from other types of data in its requirements for bandwidth and low latency. The user needs to experience a near-‐continuous transmission so the content seems smooth and not subject to an annoying series of stops and starts, and that requirement lasts as long as the video does, whether it runs one minute or one hour. Essentially, video needs a higher level of quality of service (QoS) than even voice transmission for IP telephony. The result is that video is high-‐bandwidth traffic.
Bandwidth Squeeze In a dedicated network, such as the ones you find in telecommunications and video broadcast companies, that is no problem. The channels are devoted to moving the material. But corporate networks are not designed with video QoS in mind. That may have relatively low impact within a single company campus where the high bandwidth of typical local area networks (LANs) can carry video as well as traditional network traffic without significant impact on performance.
For more distributed corporations, however, the problems are greater. The more widely dispersed a company's facilities, the more it relies on interconnecting individual locations with a wide area network (WAN). But those WAN connections are the figurative and literal communication weak links. Medium-‐ and large-‐size offices may have higher-‐bandwidth connections to an Internet backbone, but speeds of 100Mbps and above are relatively rare outside of data centers. Smaller regional and sales offices have more limited access, rarely even approaching what consumers can get from telecommunications companies. Minor facilities might be connected only by ISDN lines, T1 lines, or at best, DSL at 2 Mbps to 4 Mbps. Businesses can easily saturate use during work hours.
Compared to the high speed of LANs, WANs are low-‐bandwidth connections that become bottlenecks due to the size of video files. Download some corporate video at a remote office and the result easily pushes out other types of traffic for the time it takes video to arrive at the computer of the person who requested it. That can bring many operations at that office to an effective stop to the extent that work depends on access to back-‐office systems and information stored at corporate data centers.
As use of enterprise video increases, as it is already doing, the situation is only compounded. Again, there may be few issues on a single central campus running on high-‐bandwidth LANs. But for a company of any size with remote operations and/or international presence, the WAN will increasingly lack the capacity necessary to convey the combination of video and other traffic.
To implement preferential treatment of traffic would require the company to decide which reports, memos, transactions and other vital activities were less important than others. The phrase "good luck with that" comes to mind. And upgrading current LAN technology to provide even more bandwidth doesn't improve the situation enough because it doesn't reach the root of the problem.
Finding a Video Solution
A solution depends on three factors. The first is the nature of the video itself: whether streamed live, delivered on demand, pushed in the background, or some combination of these types. Live video needs near real-‐time bandwidth and a delivery mechanism to have it simultaneously reach all employees who need to view it. Depending on where those employees are, that may mean monopolizing multiple WAN links at the same time. Such video is a predictable and occasional peak traffic event; IT will plan for a large impact for a limited time. Once over, the video may be stored somewhere, but it becomes far less important.
Video on demand still requires bandwidth, but it is generally not as concentrated. Viewing will be staggered, which reduces pressure on the system. Such videos must be available whenever people ask, so there is an ongoing need to make these large files always available to anyone who might request to see them. IT must make the video available in the future as a permanent resource. Because real time is not necessary in this case, the company can transmit video to remote locations at off hours when competing traffic is at its lowest.
Background-‐push video is almost a hybrid between real-‐time streaming and video on demand. The company specifies which employees will watch a video, and they may even specify times. However, because the video is not live, IT can transmit it at more convenient times and have it ready in advance for viewing.
Current and Planned Use of Video The mix of video types is only the first factor. Next is current and projected use. IT should evaluate the degree to which the company currently employs video, and also the specifics of how it is put into use. Are there particular types of video that are favored? Does the company tend to distribute video with any predictable frequency or in a discernable pattern? After getting a grasp of current use, IT should then perform projections, based on the expectations of line-‐of-‐business managers and the corporate communication department, of how video use is expected to expand in the future.
Finally, IT must look at both the structure of the company and its geographic distribution. The organizational structure may influence video use. For example, some divisions or departments might make more widespread use of the medium than others. That, in turn, can influence where on the network video distribution takes place, which video types will be more prevalent and how quickly use will grow.
Needs Assessment Each company has a unique set of requirements and therefore its own optimum enterprise video distribution solution. By performing a needs assessment, IT can identify the factors that influence the type of solution that would best work for the company.
Assessing needs is a four-‐step process:
1. Enterprise video use 2. Corporate topology 3. Employees 4. Budget constraints
An enterprise can perform its own needs assessment or contract a consultancy to do so on its behalf. Even if outsourcing the assessment, IT executives should understand the basic process to ensure that a consultancy provides reliable results.
Enterprise Video Use Start with the current video consumption. There are two general cases: Either the company has already adopted enterprise video or an executive is pushing for its (possibly immediate) use. You need to determine critical communications, including how often leadership will want to engage every employee, as well as the mix of live and on-‐demand video to determine whether the network will be able to meet those requirements.
In the former case, although departments may have estimates, the best approach is actual measurement. Over some period of time, like a month, run reports to see daily video usage. Look specifically at enterprise video, whose origin and destination are within the corporate firewall.
To the degree possible, capture a variety of important factors, such as the total number of video minutes, when videos are typically viewed, the type of video (as in live, on-‐demand, or pushed in the background), and the video quality in resolution and degree of compression. The latter can help identify the types of devices that employees use to watch video, which provides further insight into the maximum quality of image and sound that the users can perceive. Understanding the range of device profiles might give IT leeway to reduce viewing quality and file size to eliminate at least part of the distribution problem. (IT could also explain that quality demands drive even bandwidth and latency issues.)
Once current use is clear, take a retrospective view of enterprise video in the company. Look over the past few years and plot how various factors — minutes of video delivered per month, types of video, when during the day employees watch video, client device types and so on — have changed. Do near-‐ and mid-‐term projections based on existing numbers. Talk to executives about future plans and weight projected growth based on those insights.
Considering growth also means looking at merger and acquisition strategies. If a merger or acquisition is in the offing, the company will have to add and integrate the new organizations and may have to focus on approaches that allow more rapid integration. A solution must work for where the company is going, not just where it is today.
A company that hasn't adopted enterprise video but whose executives are pushing for its use, likely in a short time frame, faces a different situation. There are no established patterns, so the IT department needs estimates for the following:
• How often do executives want to create and deploy new videos?
• What range of time lengths might these videos run? • Do executives envision on-‐demand video, live video, or
both? • What video quality and size will you need to support? • When during the week might videos be viewed?
You should develop a best estimate of the size and timing of your upcoming video distribution needs. This estimate will likely be
inaccurate, but it gives you a point from which to start. With the size and timing, you can calculate expected impacts on networks, focusing on the WAN to outlying offices and their current traffic patterns. Understand where you are most likely to face bandwidth problems.
As the company begins to actually use video, revisit these estimates and replace them with actual numbers. Over time you continue to collect data to see how quickly video use grows. You can then use analytic tools (or even a spreadsheet) to project growth and future network impact.
Corporate Topology and Employees Because the greatest impact on video distribution comes from the WAN, the geographic distribution of the company is critical in identifying potential problems. Go beyond a breakout that’s based only on location. You also have to factor in the quality of the WAN links to each office or remote location, including those of employees who work out of home offices. An office with a high-‐speed WAN is less of a concern than one with a much lower bandwidth link.
Whether a company has already adopted video or not, examine the use of each WAN link for nonvideo applications. From that you can build profiles of links, looking at both average utilization and typical peak-‐hour spikes. Knowing what nonvideo traffic must pass through the links tells you how much room is left for video.
Employee population density and video-‐use density are also important considerations. They become weighting coefficients for the geographic distribution. For example, a remote office with a low-‐bandwidth connection and a small group of employees that
consume significant amounts of video will be more of a problem than a similar office in which employees use far less video. A location with a higher bandwidth connection but many more active employees can also be troublesome. You should look at the total amount of video transmitted to each location, in an average usage distribution throughout the day (perhaps in hourly segments), and then compare it to the available bandwidth for the location at those times.
Budget Constraints Video distribution solutions vary widely in expense. There can be initial capital expenses, ongoing operational expenses and opportunity costs in system downtime during installation and maintenance, as well as costs for not implementing a solution. It might be that a given company could consider improving only some aspects of enterprise video distribution to gain significant benefit while constraining an otherwise overwhelming financial impact. Comparing what any specific solution would cost to the benefits it could provide is vital at each step of planning.
Solution Strategies
Although companies have a number of potential solutions (or elements of a combined solution) available, there are only three underlying strategies for how to solve enterprise video distribution.
Reduction of Bandwidth Requirements The first is to reduce the amount of network traffic. A company can try to reduce the amount of nonvideo traffic to open more space for video transmission or reduce the amount of space video takes up though higher compression or smaller format.
Reducing nonvideo traffic through techniques like compression and batch processing of work in off hours can certainly succeed to some degree. But as video and other uses of networks continue to increase, it is a limited strategy. Eventually the increased use of video consumes the gained bandwidth, and the company is back where it started.
Because most video is already compressed, there is also a significant limit to how much video traffic can be shrunk without using either smaller video or increased compression. Using either technique does reduce video size, but it also means lower quality for the user. Because the quality of video experience is critical to the business, the company’s choice of delivery method can have a strong impact on corporate goals and the effectiveness of a video communication strategy.
Add Network Bandwidth The second strategy is to expand network bandwidth. As with reducing traffic, this approach can succeed for some companies, particularly those that extensively use video in a small number of offices. Such expansion, though, is typically limited to corporate LANs, where upgrading is within the control of IT and can often be accomplished in the process of normal infrastructure upgrading or equipment replacement.
WAN connections are different. For many remote offices, the bandwidth of an available WAN link is completely under the control of a telecommunications provider. The cost of expanding access can be significant, and the greater the number of remote locations, the higher the cost.
Change the Distribution The third strategy is to change the approach to distribution. Rather than shrink the data or enlarge the conduits, this type of solution depends on making better use of existing infrastructure. By using hardware and software to direct traffic and take advantage of lower demands on the network, a company can effectively increase the volume of video traffic that the network can carry.
Building a Solution
A company can use any of the three solution strategies or a mix of them to improve video distribution. The time to address the issue is before it becomes a serious problem. IT should start by working with the corporate communications department to assess business needs, including the required video types and quality, the range of devices (including mobile) that employees will potentially use, and the distribution patterns of the video.
Consider the company's video-‐delivery weak points. Are there many offices that present a problem, or are difficulties in distribution restricted to a few locations that limit the necessary scale of a solution?
There are five types of technologies that a company can use to improve enterprise video distribution, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Building a solution involves comparing your video distribution needs with the delivery weak points and then choosing the technology or mix of technologies that provide the appropriate set of characteristics for your company.
Five Ways to Improve Enterprise Video Distribution
Click on image for larger image
WAN Optimization If WAN is the inherent problem, then one approach to improving video delivery is to get more traffic across those links. WAN optimization involves compression devices on each side of a link to compress and decompress data so that it takes fewer bytes in transmission.
WAN optimization can help video transmission indirectly. Reducing the bandwidth taken by other data leaves more room for video. But it doesn't directly improve video transmission because the data is
already compressed, and additional compression techniques don't help.
There is another weakness of WAN optimization: cost. Although a single powerful compression device can handle the traffic in a data center, each remote location needs an optimization box. There are both capital expenses and the additional administrative costs of maintaining however many devices are necessary for the company's network.
WAN optimization can be a useful solution for a company with either few remote locations or when there are other reasons to use compression, such as speeding access to email or Microsoft SharePoint-‐based services. But as a primary way to address expanding video traffic, WAN optimization is not a good primary solution.
Hardware Caching In hardware caching, the IT department places caching appliances at remote offices to pre-‐position video. For example, a company might replicate content at two main offices and then copy the most-‐used videos to hardware caches at a dozen satellite offices during off hours. An IT department would be well versed in dealing with caching and additional storage, so replication could easily fit within an existing infrastructure.
As the number of remote sites increases, so does the capital expense cost of implementation. Equipment management efforts and operating expenses also expand with the number of sites. And, while a caching solution might work for on-‐demand delivery or background pushed video, it does not work for live video because
there is nothing to cache. By the time the CEO's live address to the whole company is over, all employees are supposed to have heard it. Caching only works when the audience watches video after it has been recorded.
Content Delivery Network Content delivery networks are, as the name sounds, separate networks put into place to deliver content. Some corporations might already have either a high-‐capacity content delivery network (CDN) or could contract with a third party for such a service. A CDN places servers and caching storage at multiple geographically dispersed locations to more efficiently deliver content to end users. Such a strategy can significantly increase bandwidth, availability and responsiveness, as well as reduce latency, which would improve the video delivery experience.
A company that has access to a CDN has a couple of major benefits when it comes to video distribution. Deployment of content becomes a quick process, and if the CDN already exists, additional costs are minimal. Bandwidth is generally high enough to allow the company to do what executives wish. However, third-‐party CDNs are generally optimized to deliver content to consumers by storing it near them, not near corporate offices. Building out a new CDN just for enterprise video would be extremely expensive, so few businesses will be in a position to make use of this tactic.
Using an existing CDN may also not work. Many CDNs are designed to increase availability of Web pages, which is bursty traffic, rather than continuous delivery of video, and so they are designed for a different type of problem. Furthermore, third-‐party CDNs have delivery points in central locations to serve many potential users.
The video traffic would still have to travel through remote locations' WANs, and so would do nothing to lessen the impact on the primary traffic bottlenecks.
In addition, CDNs transfer all of the data over the corporate Internet connection, which can create a bigger problem than using the WAN, since the whole company shares the Internet connection. To avoid the issue, CDNs can require the creation of multiple gateway breakouts for more localized connectivity, which also makes greater demands on security. That increases capital and operating expenses.
Multicasting As a way of delivering one set of information to a group of destinations, multicasting would seem a good match for live video. In theory, a large corporation could distribute a CEO's address to 70,000 employees though multicasting to employees in 18 different countries. As the video arrived at each remote office through the WAN, multicasting would carry it to each desktop with next to no capital expense impact. For live video, multicasting does reduce the load on the network by transmitting the material only once; however, multicasting does not support video on demand.
There are two types of multicasting: subnet multicasting, in which the clients are connected at a single switch, and multicast routing, in which the routers determine the direction the video packets must take. In theory, multicasting eliminates the need to know how many viewers there are.
In practice, multicasting requires nonstandard configuration of a network. Because there is no point-‐to-‐point connection, normal TCP protocols do not work, so packets could, in theory, be lost or incorrectly assembled. To introduce reliability into the multicast, a company must add a new set of protocols to provide a distribution mechanism. That adds complexity into administration and operation. What at first seemed like a free ride on existing equipment and communications channels becomes a complex exercise that increases in difficulty with the scale of the enterprise. Additionally, not all WANs are multicast-‐enabled. If the corporate WAN architecture uses multiple regional Internet providers, there are additional implications of building a solution.
The configuration and operational difficulties effectively mean that a company will be forced to broadcast the least common denominator of quality (which means executives will be less satisfied with the outcome), such as lowering the bit-‐rate with its resulting loss of quality, because of the slow connection of one group. Also, monitoring the experience of the user during the multicast is difficult, so ensuring proper operations and streaming is problematic.
Peer-‐assisted Software A peer-‐assisted system focuses on a pure distribution solution. Rather than limiting the size of data over WAN links or speeding the connection, the software reduces dependence on WAN by minimizing the video streams that travel over that link to a given location. Inside a campus network, the software then distributes the video from one peer client to another, making it ready for viewing. Unlike multicasting, peer-‐assisted software has no need to configure additional protocols and mechanisms on routers. The
software itself, using a combination of client and server applications, can manage routing issues.
(Note that peer-‐assisted software is far different from consumer-‐based peer software such as BitTorrent. Such software damaged corporate networks on which employees used it by consuming large amounts of bandwidth and creating security risks. Enterprise-‐grade peer-‐assisted software addresses these problems and is safe to use on corporate networks.)
A company with 100 offices distributed globally would check if an employee at a given office has already watched a particular video. If no other employee at that location has previously watched the video, the peer-‐assisted software will download it over the WAN. Now there is a copy at that particular client, which acts as a caching station. Another employee at the office looks for the video, and the software identifies the first-‐client device and obtains the video from it. As more employees watch, the video is available from an increasing number of clients, so the software can look for the nearest source in the network.
Depending on the software used, a company can address video on demand, background-‐pushed video and live streaming with the single solution, maintaining high quality. Some software solutions can discover the network topology, reducing administrative complexity. A peer-‐assisted application might be able to plan video distribution over WAN connections at times when overall use and traffic are at their lightest, working with local caching to pre-‐position content. Software is also a relatively inexpensive solution and scales well with the size of the company and distribution needs.
That said, an enterprise needs automated software distribution to efficiently install the necessary agent onto all clients. Software must be compatible with all the client devices the company uses, which can become problematic for some device types like tablets or smartphones. Instituting a peer-‐assisted delivery system may become more difficult when a company has outsourced its IT management because the effort must be coordinated between client and service provider.
Summary
There is no simple checkbox solution for video distribution. If there were, enterprises would not have a problem in the first place. By analyzing a company's specific needs and interests, the IT department can use an existing solution or mix of solutions to improve video distribution. The solution should scale up with increased use while supporting the variety of devices the company uses and the needed range of video quality, all while staying within budget constraints. And the methods the company chooses must allow the degree of video quality that suitably supports the strategic goals of the business.
About Kontiki Powered by innovative technology, Kontiki pioneered the enterprise video platform and enterprise content delivery network markets, providing superior cloud-‐based content delivery across the enterprise. The Kontiki Enterprise Content Delivery Network (ECDN) enables enterprises to distribute high quality video content to every employee without impacting the network. The technology employs a centrally managed peer-‐ assisted delivery model which moves the network load from the WAN to the LAN. This results in significant improvement over a traditional hardware solution.
Kontiki’s video solutions enable consumer-‐grade video engagement with enterprise-‐grade control over video delivery for the world’s largest companies, including American Airlines, Wells Fargo,
Nationwide and Nestle, serving nearly 1.5 million users worldwide. Kontiki offers organizations the unique ability to globally deliver video on demand or live broadcasts to 100 percent of their employees, regardless of location, and to the full range of today’s business devices, including smartphones and tablets, without congesting networks or compromising video quality.
Learn more at www.kontiki.com.
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