Looking to Deploy an Enterprise Video Content Delivery Solution?

An Enterprise Video Content Delivery Solution allows you to let your employees, customers and target audience stream in high quality at low costs. However you can find several solutions on the market. Use this blog post as a checklist of questions you should ask yourself in order to find a solution that fits your actual business needs, meets your technical requirements and doesn’t interfere with your security standards.

Here are some Key Questions to Ask.

Online video communication within the enterprise was expanding rapidly before the coronavirus, now the demand is exploding. Employees are communicating with each other through video, so why shouldn’t the executive team use video to communicate with employees. Cramming into a meeting room to watch a town hall is not efficient, it’s disruptive, and in these times downright dangerous. Unfortunately, live video broadcasts can bring corporate networks to their knees. That’s why you may be evaluating an enterprise video streaming solution. If you are looking for an enterprise CDN (Content Delivery Network) solution, here are some questions you might want to ask yourself and your potential vendors.

Enterprise CDN Considerations for Video Streaming

Questions for Business Stakeholders

Will your enterprise be utilizing live streaming, video-on-demand, or both?
What types of devices will your employees be using to watch video content? In a BYOD world, do you feel the need to support Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS & Android environments?
Does your organization have a large number of small or remote offices with limited bandwidth that you would like to reach with streaming video?
How important is video quality? Are you willing to sacrifice video quality to reduce the impact of video on the network?
What metrics will you use to grade your return on investment from streaming technology deployments? Will you need to prove payback immediately or can you invest in solutions that allow you to scale video usage as adoption expands?
How important will it be for your organization to easily update to new video formats that enhance video quality performance in the future?
How easy will it be to integrate the solution with another video or webcasting platform if there’s a need in future?

Questions for Technology Managers

What resources can your information technology department allocate to the design, implementation, and management of a viable video networking solution?
What level of experience does your vendor have in deploying their solutions across large and complex enterprise networks?
What devices do you need to reach with video? Are VDI devices part of the mix and will these devices play video?
What video platforms are currently in use in your enterprise? Will the video delivery solution integrate easily with all the platforms your are using now and in the future; Microsoft Teams and Skype, Kaltura, Brightcove, Intrado, etc.
What browsers are currently in use across your enterprise? Will the video delivery solution work for in-browser viewing?
How willing is your IT department to deploy hosted software solutions? What, if any, network security issues must be addressed before your IT team will bless that implementation of hosted options in place of on-premises solutions?
Does your network have ample capacity for all traffic, including video? If not, will you have the ability to protect business-critical traffic from large spikes of video traffic
Has your organization invested in wide-area networking solutions? If so, are the deployments of recent-enough vintage to work in concert with today’s enterprise streaming platforms? How widespread are the deployments? Are the latest formats supported?
Can the solution adapt to conditions within your network as it evolves?
To what extent has your organization deployed caching appliances supporting video streaming? Is your organization willing to allocate the budget needed to enable ample caching capacity system-wide? Are the latest formats supported?
Is it important to your network team to simulate the effects of live and on-demand video on the network prior to the event? Would you want to do this without requiring end-user participation?
Does your organization have or require the ability to visualize and troubleshoot individual viewer streaming experiences?

Security Questions:

Does your video need to remain encrypted on and off-premises?
Does the solution collect or transmit Personally Identifiable Information (PII)?
Does the video need to leave your premises to be delivered by the service?
If your vendor’s service relies on a cloud environment, do you trust the corporation that operates that service?
Is your internal IT department capable of running a complex multi-Virtual Machine (VM) service in an internal, on-premises environment?
How would your internal IT department support redundancy, scalability, and load-balancing of an internal, on-premises environment?
Do you allow 3rd parties to manage applications hosted within your internal, on-premises environment?

The Strive blog goes into a discussion of some of these criteria and how the Strive WebRTC P2P peering solution can help in a post titled “Enterprise Video Delivery: Think Peer-to-Peer”. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

How is your company handling the challenges of enterprise streaming and video communications?

About StriveCast

StriveCast is a leading technology provider for eCDN solutions. Our WebRTC-based P2P mesh network is used by large companies like Swisscom, Siemens, Gazprom, and NEP group to solve the problem of network congestion during live events. Based in Germany, we are constantly improving and adapting our cutting-edge P2P technology in order to provide the next generation of enterprise video delivery. Today, StriveCast connects over 150,000 users worldwide on a daily basis, saving customers up to 95% of CDN traffic with a unique server-side-managed Peer-To-Peer network.

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