Vbrick Boosts Networks Struggling with Video

Vbrick Distribution meets post-pandemic video needs

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Vbrick Boosts Networks Struggling with Video
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Published: May 30, 2022

James Stephen

Technology Journalist

Vbrick recently launched Vbrick Distribution to help networks deliver live and on-demand video, following a boom in the industry. 

Demand for live stream video events has increased by 14% following the pandemic, Wainhouse research shows. As a result, a number of enterprises have been unable to support this level of network usage. 

The newly published research, carried out in December 2021 and compared against a pre-pandemic survey in 2019, indicates that two years of remote work have changed the way employees engage with streaming video content. 

With the shift to remote and hybrid work, the average daily workflow has undergone huge changes. Video conferencing has become the norm and applications like Microsoft Teams and Zoom have become household names. Town halls are now frequently used as live streaming venues, broadcasting to team members around the world. 

As meetings and events have moved online, an extra load has been placed on the corporate network. Streaming video can easily overwhelm enterprise networks that aren’t designed to handle it. Without an eCDN, every time someone clicks to watch a video, a unique streaming session is started. Multiplying that by 100 or 10,000 could result in a slow network and a poor user experience, as well as create problems for technical teams. 

David Jeyes, Director of Product Management at Vbrick, said: “Video usage was already exponentially growing in the enterprise even before our forced remote work experiment over the last couple of years, and it has only continued to accelerate. 

“What we have seen is video habits have changed. People are bringing in new tools as they figure out how to collaborate remotely, and they are starting to bring those habits back as return to office is kicking off. 

“It creates an unpredictable situation for a lot of our customers and prospects because return to office is not a light switch; you cannot just turn it on and off easily.” 

Many organisations are transitioning to hybrid working on a division-by-division basis and giving their employees freedom and flexibility in the meantime, Jeyes says. 

For IT teams, it can be difficult to predict the upticks in network loads. According to the Wainhouse research, hybrid teams are likely to require more access to on-demand video than any other group. 

Some businesses may also be returning to their offices to find that their network configuration may not be working as well as when they left it. 

Vbrick Distribution eCDN Solution 

Vbrick recently launched Vbrick Distribution, a flexible, secure, and scalable eCDN (Enterprise Content Delivery Network) solution, which can work with any network configuration. 

An eCDN can eliminate latency and bandwidth issues associated with streaming video content. 

Vbrick says its solution offers flexibility, security, scalability, and real-time network analytics. There is also no limit to the number of office locations, or users Vbrick Distribution can support. 

According to Jeyes, some organisations are not yet mature enough in their video strategies to require all of Vbrick’s Enterprise Video Platform (EVP) features. For example, they may not have required the full video workflows, or they may have already had their own streaming solution. 

By modularising its EVP platform, Vbrick’s eCDN layer is made more accessible not only to large enterprises but to mid-size businesses as well. 

The platform’s interoperability with multiple applications enables Vbrick to integrate with companies which are tied to a particular application, such as Microsoft Teams. 

Jeyes says if a company is using multiple UC vendors for different purposes like internal versus external, Vbrick can interoperate with that. 

Similarly, video sources can also be integrated, whether it is an encoder or a web-based production tool. 

Jeyes said: “[What sets us apart is] the flexibility and the number of options. Vbrick Distribution uses a portfolio of native eCDN technologies including edge caching, peer-to-peer, multicast, and global content delivery networks to solve a variety of network challenges, 

“We have a lot of our competitors in this market. They have one, maybe two of these modalities. Sometimes they need a mix of these different tools to meet the needs of their networks. Often you have a headquarters office that may be multicast-enabled, but you have other remote offices that aren’t. Some offices don’t have IT staff on hand to manage the network and this is where peer-to-peer becomes more prevalent. Edge caching is often the backbone that serves video to these other technologies and allows you to store video-on-demand assets. 

“We are the only solution that offers all of these in-house and secured, so you’re not sharing data across multiple providers. 

“We also have flexible pricing options. You can buy based on the number of users you want to distribute video to or by the number of hours and have pure consumption based on what you are using” 

As return to office looms over companies worldwide, networks should be carefully checked to ensure they will be able to meet the inevitable increase in performance demands coming their way. 

You can also find out more about how Vbrick Distribution can improve corporate networks by visiting Vbrick’s website. 

 

 

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