Video Becomes An Integral Part Of Business Communications
Today, a growing number of companies are using video to share important information with employees and other stakeholders to access a wide range of important messages, from training and corporate announcements to policy updates and general news. The spread of multicast IPTV has become an important tool in the changing business landscape, especially for real-time decision support. The number of apps is huge and has increased throughout the pandemic.
According to the BTR-100 survey, 93% of enterprise technology leaders say that video traffic in their organization is growing due to end-user demand for video applications. This often results in the need to increase the bandwidth of their networks, indicating that video has become the fastest growing category of traffic on corporate networks.
The growing need for video applications is forcing many companies to rethink their corporate networks and find ways to increase bandwidth. Video applications use full bandwidth and are sensitive to latency, and as a result can quickly consume valuable network resources.
Organizations have two options to meet the growing demand for video content at work. They can either increase capacity or find ways to optimize current resources. Increasing power can be costly. This often entails buying new servers and new transcoders to upgrade the hardware in their infrastructure. This is especially true for enterprises that rely on unicast technologies, rather than multicast solutions, to deliver video to end users.
Rapidly evolving industrial IPTV-based multicast technologies are now available to support video traffic in enterprise networks in a more cost-effective and efficient manner.
Prior to the advent of IPTV, most of this type of video technology was based on cable and radio frequency (RF) solutions, which required dedicated network resources. While this strategy is still working, it requires a lot of bandwidth.
With unicast, each person viewing video content must set up a virtual point-to-point circuit to access the content stream. This approach to video delivery can significantly impact network bandwidth.
For example, if 1000 users are accessing a 3 Mbps video stream in unicast delivery, this would require 3 GB of bandwidth per second. This is very expensive and can compromise the performance of other mission-critical data and applications claiming their place in the bandwidth. Moreover, this is an unreliable solution.
Enterprises can choose one of two obvious solutions: limit the amount of video transmitted over the network, or reduce the number of people who can access video content. Many unicast organizations end up using a combination of both strategies. It's not ideal for companies that see video as a valuable format for delivering content to key stakeholders, including employees, customers, and investors.
IPTV is an open standard based on the Internet protocol that allows video to be transmitted over any network at any resolution level in the most efficient way. It's a great platform for businesses that deliver video content to users anywhere on the network, whether it's in a common area (such as a lobby or reception area) or individuals at their desks. In addition to streaming regular video from internal and external sources, IPTV platforms can support video wall and digital signage applications. This is a flexible and scalable solution.
The first generations of IPTV multicast business applications depended on plug-ins supported by major browser vendors, including Google, Apple, and Microsoft, that allowed all employees to cost-effectively access video applications. However, this strategy suffered a major setback when concerns about the inherent risk of using plugins prompted the industry to stop supporting them entirely.
Removing browser plug-ins can force organizations to revert to costly and resource-intensive unicast video delivery.
Addressing existing challenges will require new multicast technologies to allow video content to be delivered to all stakeholders, even when there is high demand for the same live stream of content. Plug-in-free multicast will offer businesses a critical tool to meet the growing demand for video content using existing network resources in a cost-effective and technically efficient way.