Feeling the Heat from Unreliable Webcasting?

The point of a live webcast is to create a virtual shared experience, to deliver a seamless message to a unified audience, and to articulate important messages in a way that engages viewers and brings ideas to life.

A live webcast is a more dynamic and impactful version of an email memo, or even a video recording. As such, they are saved for delivering important messages. But too often they have the adverse effect due to poor webcasting quality.

Our #SaveYourCEO video series depicts the typical problems with webcasting technology, problems that undermine the intended goal of a live webcast. Check out the third video in our ongoing series to see the mess our CEO gets into this time.

Check out SaveYourCEO.com to see the full series and how you can #SaveYourCEO from unreliable webcasting.

Is It Time to Retire Your Webcasting Platform?

If you’re a marketer like me, delivering webcasts is nothing new. Web conferencing and webcasting platforms like WebEx have been around for decades.

Yet despite the maturity of the webcasting platform market, webcasts have the same glitches today that they had 15 years ago, when RuPaul was the WebEx ‘spokesmodel.’

Could it be time to retire your webcasting platform? Take a look at the next segment in our ongoing video series to see what trouble our intrepid CEO gets into this time:

Ever Been A Webcasting Victim?

Picture this: you schedule a webcast for a large group. You send out invites, you prepare and practice your presentation, and everything is ready to go. On the day of the event, you start your webcast, and almost immediately the questions and complaints start arriving: “I can’t hear the audio!” “The slides aren’t moving!” “The plug-in won’t install on my desktop!” “I missed the first ten minutes, will you send around a recording?”

If you have any experience running webcasts, you’ve experienced these issues, no matter what webcasting platform you use. At Ramp, we call this being a “webcasting victim.” We recently launched the first segment of a new video campaign poking fun at webcasting technology. Take a look and let us know what you think. Then check out SaveYourCEO.com for more videos from the series.

Senior Execs Driving Search for Multicast Solution after Silverlight

For more than a year enterprises have known about the impending doomsday of Windows Media Server and Microsoft Silverlight. They’ve also known for some time about discontinued plugin support for Chrome browsers. In short, Enterprises know the ancillary pieces supporting multicast video will no longer be available and they need a new solution for video delivery, whether it be multicast, peer-to-peer or something else.

(Check out some alternatives to multicast for enterprise video delivery: “Does the End of Silverlight Mean the End of Multicast”)

But just what does that timeline look like?

Because Microsoft also stated that they would continue supporting Silverlight until 2021, the end-of-life news wasn’t enough to get people running around with their hair on fire looking for a new multicast solution.

However, as noted in a previous post, the lack of plugin support on Microsoft Edge is a more recent development that makes multicast a more pressing issue for those overseeing video in their organization. And, while the Edge news may have accelerated the timeline somewhat, ultimately the due date is unchanged from before. Just find a replacement by the time Silverlight is officially off life support in six years. In the meantime, enterprises can still fall back on the duo of Internet Explorer and Silverlight for multicast video streams. Windows 10 still supports Internet Explorer, so enterprises can run Silverlight for multicast streaming for as long as Silverlight exists. At least that’s how the thinking goes in some quarters.

And while technically speaking this is true, there are other, more powerful, forces driving the multicast timeline for an organization. It starts at the top.

Senior-level executives will be the unwitting multicast champions because they will be the first to receive new PCs running Windows 10. They will be the first to incorporate the Edge browser into their daily workflow, a workflow which increasingly includes live broadcasts.

An organization could tell its executives that they must fall back to Internet Explorer any time they wish to stream video. But will executives just accept that? Or, will they push for a more aggressive timeline for supporting Edge to be supported in all aspects of their daily workflow?

While requiring employees to switch to Internet Explorer for live events doesn’t change much in the short term, how long can it last? It would seem silly for a F500 or F1000 global company to require that employees use an outdated technology for years after it was last relevant.

Enterprises aren’t going to wait five years to upgrade their employees to Windows 10. And executives won’t accept a roundabout process for streaming and viewing live events. It will be the business executives that finally bring focus to the hazy multicast timelines of IT departments.

For more info on multicast, read about Ramp Multicast+, a secure, scalable and standards-based next-generation multicast solution.

Secure HLS Video Delivery a Reality with New Ramp Patent

Here at Ramp we foster an environment of innovation, and over the years this has resulted in more than 20 patents in video and search technology. That tradition continues with the recent award of a new patent for a new method for secure HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) video delivery which has already been implemented within the Ramp Video Management solution.

Ramp awarded patent for new method of secure video delivery that is standards-based.

This new method is standards-based and compatible across web browsers, devices, operating systems and enterprise network configurations. Ramp CTO, Ray Lau, and Manager of Platform Architecture and Engineering, R. Paul Johnson, are named as the inventors and Ramp Holdings, Inc. as the assignee.

With this patent, Ramp has created a standard method for securely delivering HLS video, the file format quickly emerging as the standard for streaming video. Designed by Apple for use in its QuickTime, Safari and iOS software, HLS is a protocol used to break up a video stream into small chunks of HTTP-based file downloads. Rather than downloading the video file as a whole, each chunk is downloaded individually to ensure seamless streaming playback.

This new method of secure video delivery is the foundation of the Ramp Video Management (RVM) solution. RVM is a cloud-based video content management system used by both enterprise and media companies, including a number of F100 and F500 businesses and three of the largest media companies in North America.

Enterprise video usage is surging as businesses are realizing the benefits of video as a communications tool. Enterprises are leveraging video to reach internal audiences in an ever-expanding range of new business use cases.

Unlike media companies, whose ultimate hope is for their video content to ‘go viral’, enterprise organizations need to closely manage who views their video content. This requires secure video delivery infrastructure and a video platform that is capable of managing permissions on a video-by-video bases. These critical needs of enterprises served as the inspiration for Lau and Johnson to develop a new method of secure video delivery.

“Many companies are not experts in video and do not want to provision a secure infrastructure. Some of these companies find it more convenient to turn to an Internet cloud-based solution,” writes Ray Lau, Ramp CTO, in the patent document.

The historical solution for companies who desire a secure video delivery infrastructure but lack the expertise to build one themselves is typically to employ Digital Rights Management (DRM) solutions.

However, DRM solutions are bound to a proprietary video player and platform, which could create problems for using widely available internet infrastructures such as Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). In addition, DRM solutions may introduce compatibility issues across devices that may not support the platform, such as the unavailability of Adobe.RTM. Flash, and limit the ability for video player customization.

“What is needed is an ability to deliver video securely while using widely deployed commodity Internet infrastructure(s) with maximal compatibility across web browsers, devices, operating systems, enterprise network configurations and so forth,” Lau adds in the patent.

The solution devised by Lau and Johnson allows for secure standards-based video playback for HLS videos. The compatibility achieved by a standards-based solution is crucial for enterprise organizations with thousands of employees attempting to securely view videos from a myriad of devices, browsers and platforms.

“It is a fundamental need of our Ramp Video Management (RVM) product to ensure the security of the videos that we’re managing for customers,” said R. Paul Johnson. “Part of our security system is to ensure that our customers videos are secure in the cloud but also only accessible by the appropriate viewer within their organization.”

RVM Secure Video delivery is based upon cryptographically signed URLs supporting both short and long lived time to live (ttl). RVM Signed URLs are secured by the SHA1DSA Digital Signal Algorithm, and, the RVM Notary Proxy supports key rotation for long lived signed URLs.

Ramp’s method for secure video delivery is a technically better solution to DRMs because it is not proprietary and is therefore more compatible with players and network infrastructures.

Read the full patent here.