Video to Flood Corporate Networks, Too

Written by R. Scott Raynovich - Light Reading

Thursday, April 23. 2009 at 01:00 PM EDT 2 comments

Digg   Del.icio.us   Reddit   Email This

1 saves

• Login to Rate

LAS VEGAS -- NABShow 2009 -- You've heard about the flood of video through the Internet tubes, all fueled by viral video, YouTube, Hulu.com, and the like. But what about large corporate networks? Apparently it's happening there as well.

Video adoption on enterprise networks has been a big topic of discussion here among technology and service providers.

"If I had a dollar for every time somebody mentioned 'enterprise video' I wouldn't have to buy my plane ticket home," says Randy Levine, VP of business development for online video specialist iStreamPlanet Co.

The data on online video growth in general is mind-boggling. Cisco's famous "Zettaflood" report last year predicted that video would make up half of the Internet's traffic by 2012, when Internet traffic would hit 522 exabytes.

Other data shows online video usage accelerating. For example, Comscore reports that online video traffic spiked 34 percent in 2008. In addition to the YouTube viral video phenomenon, traffic was boosted by the uptake from higher-quality professional content sites, such as Hulu.com.

AT&T confirms that all of its public networks are being filled up with video-based IP traffic. "Our network is now handling 17 petabytes per day [in total Internet traffic], and 40 percent of that is video," says Sam Farraj, AVP, Strategy Product Development, Content Distribution, AT&T. "That will grow to 65 percent in the next 5 years."

But what's not often mentioned is that the online video explosion is happening in parallel on private corporate networks. Farraj says his customers' networks are starting to "choke" on the expansion of IP-based video that's occurring -- and the traffic is being consumed by legitimate purposes other than surfing YouTube during lunch.

"In the last 12 months they got religion about IP video," he says, speaking of corporate technology specialists.

Here are some examples: One large auto manufacturer has 16,000 hours of video in its library, says Farraj. An elevator manufacturer is converting all of its service manuals into video tutorials, he adds, which will result in terabytes of new video files.

That doesn't even include the activities of entertainment companies, which are voracious consumers of digital bandwidth. Imagine multiple hi-def cameras on an advanced video shoot. The standard HD feed is 1.5 Gbit/s, though that can be compressed down to 50 Mbit/s or so to put it on a network. Film a few hours with multiple cameras, and the terabytes pile up rapidly.

Another source in the technology community points to a major insurance provider that had to upgrade its entire data center to handle the explosion of video content.

Where's it all lead? The technology and service providers see dollars. They will gladly sell you new gear and services to manage it all.

Here's a short list of what corporate networks might need to get more video-savvy: workflow and content management systems, video-optimized storage systems, networking gear, cloud-storage solutions, even new cameras.

Jeff Whatcott, VP of marketing at Brightcove Inc. , says the company is focusing on the opportunity as corporate marketers get savvy to the use of Web video. He thinks it's a huge new market.

"They're going to buy video delivery capacity the way they bought CRM tools," he says.

Skeptics say it's just another excuse to sell stuff. "Of course they're talking about the enterprise, that's because they desperately need to make money somewhere," said one CDN provider who did not want to be named.