MediaPlatform SmartPath

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1 MediaPlatform SmartPath Copyright 2011 by MediaPlatform, Inc.

2 MediaPlatform offers enterprises the unique ability to webcast to virtually any end user, regardless of location or content technology. We call this MediaPlatform SmartPath webcasting. Overview Webcasting in corporations and comparable organizations has grown increasingly challenging in the last few years. While most information workers and managers now expect unimpeded access to video content, devices and delivery technologies have proliferated. Your employees, customers and partners expect to see your webcast presentations wherever they happen to be inside or outside the firewall - on multiple platforms and devices. The result is an uneven patchwork of webcast delivery that can be frustrating for the audience as well as for the IT department that supports video in the enterprise. MediaPlatform is now pioneering a new approach to webcast delivery that enables a pervasive delivery of presentations across virtually any type of delivery scenario. Called MediaPlatform SmartPath, it provides a framework to define the particular set of media and failover rules that makes sense for your organization. SmartPath provides the infrastructure for an "overlay network" which combines all of the media technologies which are applicable in different situations. For instance, audience participants on the general Internet may be good candidates to receive their stream from a CDN (such as Akamai), while other viewers may be good candidates for Adobe Multicast Fusion. Each audience participant will receive the media stream that makes sense for them (e.g. HTML5 over HTTP streaming or Flash video over RTMP) delivered over the most efficient and network safe technology possible (e.g. a CDN or ecdn or WAN Acceleration device, and so forth.) The Challenging Enterprise Webcasting Universe The mandate to deliver webcast presentations to everyone, everywhere on any kind of platform is not a minor challenge for the IT department. An assortment of solutions have come online in recent years that enable webcasts to reach many, though usually not all, audience members. The following table summarizes the major delivery methods and their respective limitations. Environment Solution Strengths Challenges Internet Content Distribution Network (CDN) e.g. Akamai, Limelight Huge public reach, economical charges based on usage Too many simultaneous viewers behind the firewall will use up the bandwidth. Internet Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Large public reach, economical Requires reasonable local Internet connections Internet Unicast Low latency, little to no Scalability challenges Enterprise Content Distribution Network (ecdn) e.g. Cisco implementation costs. Not future-proof Not easily expandable for changes in the organizational 1

3 ACNS, Bluecoat IP Multicasting P2P Multicasting (e.g. Application level multicast on with Adobe Flash Media Enterprise Server) WAN Acceleration (e.g. Riverbed) Leverages existing investment in WAN Acceleration for structure or M&A. Costly to manage and maintain. If not already available, can be costly to setup and maintain. Requires reasonable local Internet connections Costly, not particularly flexible, typically cannot reach everywhere on the network. video Each solution to the video challenge has its strengths, but no single solution can reach all audience members at least without a tremendous effort. Cost and time are the major obstacles to delivering webcast presentations to everyone. Multicasting and ecdn solutions tend to be expensive and time-consuming to implement. Then, with the inevitable restructurings and mergers that occur in the corporate world, the brittle setup of these solutions can be difficult to modify economically. The Solution MediaPlatform SmartPath solves the challenges of delivering webcast presentations to all audience members by delivering the webcast on an overlay network, an abstraction layer leverages all necessary options when appropriate. This approach, which we call pervasive webcasting, uses a rule-based IP address analysis to assign a compatible stream to each delivery technology dynamically. The figure below provides a high level description of the process. To illustrate how SmartPath works, consider how you would efficiently webcast a presentation to a dozen locations behind the firewall, some of which were multicast enabled, others of which were accessible to an ecdn and others of which were not. You would need to reach people in the public, as well as those on ios devices. Using MediaPlatform s SmartPath, you could leverage all existing delivery solutions in tandem with suitable delivery mechanisms where needed. For example, for locations that lacked ecdn service, you could do peer-to-peer webcasting from a cloud-based media server. MediaPlatform s WebCaster can be configured to match streams to delivery solutions by IP address range and other factors. On the encoding end, pervasive webcasting offers a high level of redundancy and reliability. WebCaster s built-in re-director function allows for hot swapping of encoders or servers in the 2

4 event of a failure. Multiple encoders and servers can be put into service simultaneously to provide redundancy and real-time failover. In the event of an encoder or server failure, the end viewer sees a momentary lapse in signal, following by a transparent, automated routing of a viable stream to the player. Advantages MediaPlatform SmartPath offers enterprise webcasters a number of business and technology advantages. These include the following: Cost Savings by leveraging existing solutions alongside modern cost-effective solutions. Unmatched audience reach Reliability through redundancy in servers and encoders Adaptation to mergers, acquisitions and restructurings Future-proofing of video infrastructure 3

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