Today’s post was written by Jonathan Discount, Executive Director of Solutions Engineering & Technology Evangelization at MPS Broadband Americas.
We’ve all watched streaming video on the Internet. YouTube, Hulu and other sites have generated enormous amounts of video on demand traffic across public networks for years. And the 2012 Olympics demonstrated the public’s growing appetite for live video as well.
But most of us watch Internet video via consumer high speed Internet connections – DSL, cable or fiber-optic connections now available offer 3Mbps download speeds and can scale as high as 300Mbps. Ironically, businesses – even the largest international corporations – don’t have as much readily available connectivity for video. In some cases, a business may only deploy a single 1.5Mbps link to support dozens of users. Businesses must also manage tremendously complex networks – incorporating dozens or hundreds of routers, firewalls, switches, VPNs, Intranets, Extranets & more!
Yet these same businesses need to deliver a great video experience to all of their users – whether that is a live webcast of the chairman, a training session or even a live news channel.
To date, most solutions for delivering video on a bandwidth-constrained network have leveraged IP Multicast or been built on proprietary, appliance-based technologies.
But Multicast is not an easy technology to set up and maintain. It may require the firmware of dozens of routers to be upgraded and configurations synchronized. Also, next generation Adaptive Bitrate Streaming technologies used to deliver the highest quality video over the Internet have provided only limited support. And Multicast-based delivery is still limited by download link capacity – so it is only suitable for lower bitrate, lower quality video distribution.
Appliance-based solutions have their own challenges: a new “box” must be purchased and physically deployed at dozens of locations across the network. Device configurations must also be constantly monitored, maintained and upgraded. This may be a boon for a networking appliance company – but it’s not a model that can scale financially or operationally for even a moderately sized, distributed enterprise.
In 2011, Internet visionary Marc Andreesen described “Why Software Is Eating The World”: how the unmatched flexibility of software is transforming whole industries. So it will transform live video distribution as well.
MPS Broadband has developed Peer2View, a patented distribution technology powered by Microsoft Windows Azure, for video streaming of live events and linear TV over private networks and beyond. Fully software-based, Peer2View facilitates the delivery of video using secure and dynamically created peer networks. Peer2View keeps traffic local and reduces network load by up to twenty times over the Internet and up to one hundred times in private networks. Peer2View is network friendly, able to dynamically adjust load on network links and can be configured to yield to more important TCP/IP traffic.
Combined with the reach and scalability of Microsoft Windows Azure Media Services, Peer2View can provide a solution for live video streaming unmatched in the industry today.
MPS Broadband is showcasing Peer2View inside the Microsoft Booth at the NAB. Drop in and meet us for a demo!