A recent survey by Onstream Media and Unisphere Research reveals the major areas of interest for vendors buying large-scale webcasting services. The results identify multi-device video delivery and player load time (i.e., a quality user experience) as the top requirements.
Multicast video delivery remains the most efficient way to transfer live video data within the enterprise and the Ramp Multicast+ brings multicast support to industry-standard HLS. Here’s how Ramp Multicast+ compares:
Multicast+ vs. Unicast video delivery
Unicast requires expensive/dedicated video caching software at every office. In addition, it is inefficient at scaling for events with tens of thousands of viewers. The ability to broadcast to audiences of this size have become a requirement for many enterprises.
Multicast+ vs. Multicast Alternatives
Ramp Multicast+ is the only multicast video delivery solution on the market with key features such as Digital Video Recording (DVR), Forward Error Correction (FEC), video data encryption, network diagnostics for multicast performance, among others. In addition, many current multicast solutions still rely on Microsoft Silverlight for video playback. This is a major issue due to EOL status for Silverlight and Windows Media. Silverlight is also a plugin, and plugins are no longer supported on the major browsers such as Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.
Multicast+ vs. Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer solutions are complex and don’t provide IT departments with their desired level of transparency. IT professionals have little insight into how the video is being routed and controlled. IT wants to know what’s happening on their network at all times and they want to use standard network protocols, such as multicast and unicast.
Multicast+ vs. Microsoft Video
Microsoft’s video offerings such as Microsoft Video and Skype for Business have enjoyed early success at penetrating the enterprise and getting more employees to use video. However, they don’t have a way to manage video within the network. Microsoft video doesn’t have a unicast caching solution and does not work for multicast and peer-to-peer solutions. Therefore, it may not scale for internal distribution.
