Scale video delivery with SDN/eCDN to optimize your network for Microsoft 365 live events

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Microsoft Stream Blog articles.

With increased use of live and on demand video streaming within organizations, one of the challenges is ensuring that your network can effectively support video traffic as you start streaming more and more.

Network infrastructure IT teams need to ensure that all business traffic, including internal video traffic, will be able to be delivered efficiently to all users of the organization’s network. Network teams need to know that if everyone in the organization watches the live streamed monthly company meeting or if everyone in the organization jumps in and watches the video sent out by the CEO at 8am Monday, that the network will work correctly, and the video traffic won’t impact other day to day business traffic.

Smart encoding and adaptive bitrate streaming help to optimize video viewing and playback by reducing network and internet traffic. However, because playback is unicast for live events or videos sent out to large portions of your organization, there could be a significant amount of network bandwidth consumed by viewers that requires additional support.  

For organizations that want to reduce this internet traffic and have a more predictable network for video streaming, there are two options:

1. Leverage existing web cache proxies in your network

If you have an existing web cache proxy it may be possible to route the streaming video traffic from Microsoft Stream, Microsoft Teams, and Yammer through those proxies to help reduce some of the internet bandwidth used for streaming videos. You will need to work with your cache proxy vendor to see if this is possible for your network.

2. Get expert help with scaling video delivery by leveraging trusted video delivery providers

Several video delivery eCDN/SDN solutions are pre-integrated and can be setup to be used with Microsoft Stream, Microsoft Teams, and Yammer. These SDN / eCDN platforms enable organizations to optimize network bandwidth without sacrificing end user viewing experiences. Our partners can help enable a more scalable and efficient video distribution across your enterprise network.

See more information from our providers:

Hive Streaming provides a simple and powerful solution for live and on-demand enterprise video distribution. Hive is a software-based solution that requires no additional hardware or bandwidth and provides a secure way to enable thousands of simultaneous video viewers without impact to your network. For customers looking to understand the impact video is having on their network prior to purchasing an SDN/eCDN solution, Hive Streaming also provides a browser-based analytics solution for Stream customers. Learn more

 Kollective's cloud-based, smart peering distribution platform leverages your existing network infrastructure to deliver content, in many forms, (live streaming video, on-demand video, software updates, security patches, and more) faster, more reliably and with less bandwidth. Our secure platform is trusted by the world’s largest financial institutions and with no additional hardware, setup and maintenance are easy. Learn more

Ramp OmniCache™ is an intelligent video caching solution that optimizes the distribution of both live and on-demand video, reducing bandwidth consumption by 90% or more. OmniCache deploys entirely behind the firewall on existing infrastructure (hardware server or virtual environment) and unlike peering solutions does not require any plugins, client software, or cloud-based controllers, for enterprise-grade security with minimal effort to deploy and maintain.

Learn more

Ramp Multicast+ is the next-generation multicast solution for HTML5 video and a direct replacement for legacy multicast technologies such as Windows Media Server, Silverlight, Adobe Flash Player, and Cisco ECDS. Multicast+ utilizes the multicast network protocol to distribute a single video stream inside the firewall for all viewers to watch simultaneously. This software infrastructure deploys entirely behind the firewall and never needs an external connection to a cloud-based service to operate. Learn more

To learn more about video delivery network considerations and how to enable eCDN/SDN solutions for Microsoft Stream see the following help articles:

• Scaling video delivery with SDN / eCDN providers for Microsoft Stream
• Network considerations for Microsoft Stream
• Live events across Microsoft 365 in Yammer, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Stream (preview)

(Blog updated 11/9/2018 - Added information about Ramp's MultiCast+ solution that is now integrated with Microsoft Stream and external encoder live events).