By Julie Basa
Happy (Multicast) Monday! It’s the start of a new week, and I’m ready to take on the world. Translation: I’m going to do all the things this week. But here’s the thing, if you try to do all the things, you’re bound to fail. As a result, I’m getting back to the basics and thinking about building a foundation for success… and that’s what we’re going to talk about today.
It might seem like a stretch to compare my personal goals with business objectives, but they’re fundamentally the same. In both life and business, success comes from building a foundation, having a plan and putting the right tools in place. It’s not about luck.
Improving employee engagement in one form or another is almost always a key business objective. There are so many facets to employee engagement, but internal communications is table stakes for capturing the hearts and minds of employees. Speaking from experience, all-employee meetings are an important part of the plan.
So, how do we go about building a foundation for success? A good message and a way to deliver it. Webcasting all-employee meetings is the most efficient and cost-effective way to reach everyone at one time—but you need to have the right tools. An easy-to-use video player—like Microsoft Stream, Brightcove or TalkPoint—is a no brainer. Let’s take one step back and look at the foundation: your network.
Video uses a massive amount of bandwidth to travel your network. If you haven’t prepared, your network will slow to a snail’s pace, resulting in a poor viewer experience. A little buffering or latency, and employees will drop from your live stream.
All that work for nothing.
If this sounds familiar, you need enterprise content delivery network (eCDN) in your toolbox. An eCDN intelligently routes video traffic to optimize your network without sacrificing user experience. The most common eCDNs are multicast, video caching and peer-to-peer.
- Multicast: Distributes a single video stream across the enterprise network to be watched by hundreds or thousands of viewers simultaneously.
- Video Caching: Stores and distributes video from strategic locations around the network, typically close to concentrations of viewers near the edge of the enterprise WAN.
- Peer-to-Peer: Uses available connected personal devices already on the network (peers) to host and distribute segments of the video.
Which eCDN will work for you depends on a variety of factors—and it’s definitely not one-size-fits-all.
At Ramp, our sole focus is video distribution behind the firewall, making us uniquely positioned to talk all things eCDN. We can help you explore the options and figure out what approach will work for you.
Drop us a line or read our whitepaper about the different approaches to video distribution behind the firewall.
