Making streaming work


So what’s involved in implementing a streaming media solution for your organisation? First of all, you’ll want to inform your IT people. Smith: “Network staff need a better understanding of streaming media and the issues involved. Although they don’t need to have a detailed technical knowledge, they need to be aware of the requirements in terms of hardware and software, and the implications on bandwidth. The overwhelming majority of enterprises use an external provider to compress, encode and then serve up the content, but where there’s likely to be a significant internal audience, they should also look at ways of reducing the impact on the network inside the firewall. For example, Volera provides software which can take a single, live Internet stream and split it to a large number of internal users. The alternative would be every user requiring their own stream from the outside and that’s often simply not possible. Even more important is caching, so that archived media streams can be accessed as locally as possible. Our Velocity CDN product uses a single management console, allowing enterprises to anticipate demand for content and cache it as near as possible to the point of need.”

Some care also needs to be taken in the preparation of content. Adrian Snook is Business Development Director for the Training Foundation: “To aid compression, which is vital when preserving bandwidth, it helps to shoot with high contrast, a minimum of detail and no fast cuts. You may have to prepare the media files at a number of window sizes to suit the availability of bandwidth for different categories of users. And, where window sizes are small, you don’t want the user to be looking at a lot of fine detail. Another consideration is that sometimes streaming alone is not the best way of distributing video content. Where a user is going to want to watch a clip over and over, which might be the case with, say, a skills demonstration, a download might actually be the best solution, or at least an option.”

In the end, until content providers get on board, streaming media is in danger of being a solution looking for a problem. So what plans do the owners of rich media content have to make use of streaming? Jeet Khaira is CEO of the UK’s major supplier of training videos: “Streaming is our future. We are embracing it big time. We have conducted trials and are now going ahead to make available anything from whole programmes to short clips through an Internet portal. We see the audience for the portal as large corporates, for whom we’ll use a licensing model, through to SMEs and individual learners, who’ll pay per view. Our huge library of content can be accessed by anyone from a trainer in the classroom to an employee at their desktop.” And to which company is Jeet referring? Why, it’s Video Arts, which, unless I’m very much mistaken, is where we came in.




E-Learning's Greatest Hits
E-learnings Greatest Hits
ISBN: 0954590406
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 198

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