White Paper The Changing Landscape of Video Delivery in the Enterprise Efficient, Scalable Streaming with the Adobe® Flash® Platform By Lisa Larson‐Kelley Web Video Consultant MediaPlatform, Inc. 8383 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 750 Los Angeles, CA 90211 (310) 909‐8410 www.mediaplatform.com [email protected] Copyright © 2011 by Lisa Larson‐Kelley THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE OF VIDEO DELIVERY IN THE ENTERPRISE Introduction This document is for IT professionals and other decision makers who want to understand the sweeping changes happening in enterprise video today. We will discuss new technologies and solutions that can help you deliver richer interactive video content while actually reducing costs. You’ll see how you can use your existing infrastructure to deliver full‐featured, cost‐effective streaming across your entire enterprise ‐‐ without the complexity you may have encountered in the past. Why Streaming Within the Enterprise is Different Streaming media has the potential to revolutionize communication within large organizations. It can help drive collaboration and provide consistent and timely communication that reaches everyone, regardless of their location. Unfortunately, this potential is often limited by the realities of budget‐ strained corporate networks and shortcomings in video delivery solutions. With the rapid growth being seen in online media consumption, managing network traffic efficiently has never been more important. Multicast delivery is one very effective way to manage bandwidth when dealing with large‐scale broadcasts of video and audio data. While multicast solutions such as Windows Media have traditionally met the basic needs of enterprise customers for bandwidth‐efficient streaming, there is a growing demand for interactivity and wider reach. Audiences expect rich features such as audience polling, email integration, archive editing, and customized event interfaces, and they want to be able to participate wherever they are, on any device. MediaPlatform is the industry’s first webcasting solution that couples the latest multicast technology with this full feature set, enabling scalable and cost‐efficient streaming across the enterprise. MediaPlatform® WebCaster enables you to easily produce webcasts with presenters in one or multiple locations and reach audiences in excess of tens of thousands of live concurrent viewers. It enables you to produce, broadly distribute and monitor deeply interactive live and on‐demand webcasts that feature streaming video, PowerPoint® slides, audio, surveys, polls, and screen demoing. When to Choose Multicast Traditional RTMP streaming is a unicast delivery method. With unicast, a separate and dedicated stream is delivered to each client. Multicast uses a different approach, with a single stream being replicated on the network for delivery to multiple clients. Optimal for one–to‐all distribution such as company‐wide broadcasts, partner training, communication with remote offices, or all‐hands meetings, multicast is the obvious delivery solution for enterprise – especially those with networks enabled with native multicast support. There are three types of multicast delivery available on the Flash platform: IP multicast, application multicast, and multicast fusion. 1 | Page THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE OF VIDEO DELIVERY IN THE ENTERPRISE IP multicast, also referred to as native multicast, is a hardware‐based approach that requires routers with multicast‐enabled software. Traffic for a specific multicast group will go through a particular network node only once no matter how many viewers there are for the broadcast. While IP multicast does not require special server software, the IT staff will need to be involved to enable multicast on the routers, configure tunnels, and create unique multicast addresses for each broadcast. This approach is only appropriate for internal enterprise streaming where the network hardware can be finely tuned for hardware‐assisted delivery. Application multicast, on the other hand, can be used for multicast delivery outside of internal networks. This approach does not require special network hardware. Using peer‐to‐peer technology, application multicast can enable massive public broadcasts with low network traffic, saving money on bandwidth costs. A rendezvous server is required to make peer introductions over RTMFP, with a Flash Player as the client. Chunks of data are pulled and pushed among a complex mesh of peers, achieving scalable, optimized delivery. Multicast fusion provides the best of both worlds. By combining the two technologies, a bridge is created between internal and external users (Figure 1). Internal users receive video via IP multicast and those clients are then used to help distribute to external users using application multicast. This innovative approach delivers an overall higher quality of service and increased reach, while saving bandwidth and infrastructure costs. WebCaster uses multicast fusion to efficiently deliver video throughout large organizations broadcasting both internally and externally. Figure 1. Live broadcast using multicast fusion. 2 | Page THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE OF VIDEO DELIVERY IN THE ENTERPRISE Benefits of Multicast Over Unicast (RTMP or HTTP) Traditional RTMP and HTTP streaming are unicast delivery methods. They use Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connections. While TCP is reliable, providing ordered delivery of video, audio, and data between a server and a client, it can be inefficient. Often this data can be lost in transmission or delivered out of order. If this happens, TCP requests that the data be resent. Once the missing data is received and put into the correct order the video can be played. As you might imagine, this ensures that the video data is intact, but adds latency and can interrupt the playback experience. Figure 2. Communication paradigms for UDP and TCP connections. Multicast is a User Datagram Protocol (UDP) based delivery method. UDP ensures that connections are not interrupted if network problems occur, making it a more efficient alternative to TCP for sending video and audio data (Figure 2). Unlike TCP, UDP does not try to recover data that has been lost in transmission, which provides less latency with live broadcasts. Compared with unicast delivery, multicast can provide huge network efficiencies. It can dramatically reduce the use of bandwidth and server resources, resulting in lower total cost of delivery. It can also provide ultra‐low latency for sharing video, audio, and data over networks enabled with multicast support. 3 | Page THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE OF VIDEO DELIVERY IN THE ENTERPRISE Myths About Multicast and Flash Multicast in the enterprise has always been great in theory, but it often fell short in all but a few specialized use cases. It has lacked the flexibility many people expect and desire in corporate communication today. Alternatively, RTMP streaming on the Flash Platform could historically deliver rich interactivity, but performance and scalability were not enterprise grade. When Adobe introduced multicast delivery on the Flash platform in Flash Player 10.1, it was initially received with some skepticism. What about firewalls? What about streaming to devices such as iPad and iPhone? Can we expect HD quality to play back smoothly? How does peer‐to‐peer come into play, and how secure is it? Adobe addressed many of these concerns with multicast fusion, a solution for efficient multicast delivery to clients both inside and outside the corporate network. This innovative approach leverages both IP (Internet Protocol) multicast and application‐level multicast to reach 100% of the users without the need for costly and time‐consuming network upgrades, and brings enterprise governance and control to peer‐to‐peer video streaming. Let’s take a closer look at how MediaPlatform’s solution addresses some common concerns about enterprise‐level multicast on the Flash platform: o Multicast streaming isn’t supported in Flash Player. Multicast is now supported in Flash Player 10.1 and later. Standard IP multicast, which relies on network hardware, is supported. Peer‐to‐peer, also referred to as application multicast, is also available for efficient streaming between peers on networks that are not multicast‐enabled. Finally, a hybrid of these two approaches, multicast fusion, allows streams to be delivered to clients both inside and outside of multicast‐enabled networks. WebCaster uses this innovative approach. o It won’t work on iPad and iPhone. MediaPlatform supports all iOS and Android tablets and phones, automatically choosing between HTML5 and Flash where appropriate. o Video image quality is poor for broadcasts in Flash, there’s no H.264 support. The Flash platform now supports HD quality H.264 video. With multicast support, you can now deliver this high bitrate stream reliably, on a massive scale. o Video playback in Flash is often choppy. Enhancements in Flash Player 11 and later have greatly improved playback performance, utilizing hardware acceleration to play video smoothly even at full screen. 4 | Page THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE OF VIDEO DELIVERY IN THE ENTERPRISE o Our broadcast needs to be secure. There are many levels of security available with Flash delivery. The stream itself can be encrypted. You can also check to be sure the client accessing the stream is authorized to do so, and hasn’t been tampered with in any way. WebCaster adds additional controls, such as LDAP integration, secure logins and administrator access controls. How MediaPlatform Enhances Multicast