We are very excited today to announce the VBrick Enterprise Media System (VEMS) Plug-In for Sametime, which enables IBM® Lotus® Sametime® clients to browse, search, play, and share video without having to leave their familiar Sametime environment. Today’s announcement further builds upon last week’s announcements of our new VBrick Enterprise Media System (VEMS) and the announcement of Gurdeep Pall, the corporate vice president of the Unified Communications Group at Microsoft, to VBrick’s Board of Directors.
The VEMS Plug-in for Sametime allows users, without leaving their Sametime environment, to browse, search, and play live and stored video – and even webcasts and live television channels. Additionally, users can easily share video with their, contacts and even chat with content experts who have published content.
We believe
this is innovative capability really demonstrates VBrick’s market leadership and knowledge of the types of applications customers are looking to enable with IP video streaming. Until now, the Streaming and Unified Communications worlds were largely separate. The VEMS Plug-In for Sametime, unifies these two environments. And, when it is combined with VEMS, this really allows organizations to deliver video to any enterprise location or the Internet without disrupting other applications through VEMS Intelligent Video Networking Engine .
VBrick’s strategy is to establish IP video streaming as a distinct, essential component of unified communications. VEMS and the Plug-in to Sametime are just our first two examples of products that we will be delivering based on this vision. Other examples are our integration with the Polycom RSS and Tandberg Content Server products, which transcode video conferences and are then distributed by VBrick appliances with the VEMS system managing the distribution. We will continue to push the envelope on developing new Unified Communications applications that leverage IP video streaming.
We are interested in hearing from you on this subject. How would you like to see the Unified Communications and IP Video streaming world come together? What interesting applications would you like to enable on your network or the Internet? Leave a comment below..
Press Release – VBrick Enterprise Media System Plugin for IBM Lotus Sametime
More at VBrick.com – VEMS Sametime Plugin Product Page
I like the idea. However it has to be done so that there is no penalty in peformance or interruption of other services Sametime or the Lotus Client provides. I think the video streaming is becoming more mainstream and will be a big part of Unified Communications. Great idea, and I like the modular approach Sametime provides for things like this.
As a developer who worked on this project, I can say that the plug-in acts as a mechanism to access data about available video and isn’t bogged down by the actual video stream itself. Once a user selects available video content, that stream is launched in a browser window which handles viewing. We’ve taken great care in preserving the the quality of the Sametime user experience and minimizing the load on Sametime itself.
@Dave – As Scott mentioned Sametime provides the User Interface. All of the heavy lifting of content aggregation, archiving, encoding, playback is done through the VBrick IP video solution which would appear seamless to Sametime users without effecting performance.
We agree with you about streaming becoming a part of UC. The Sametime Plugin is just the first development of many that will enhance UC.
I just found this post through a Sametime User Group on LinkedIn. This is cool stuff, but I am curious, on how this would impact the network? I don’t know that much about streaming video but I do know that we have Sametime users located all over the place (which is why we use Sametime).
Good point from Bob. If you have everyone streaming CNN stuff that could seriously impact network performance. Are there some estimates for a typical network 100mb/s or a Gigabit network on how many people could be streaming content before saturation? I know it depends on the source content, but use CNN or Youtube content as a typical stream.
Without getting into all of the network design nitty gritty we can easily reach all points of the network using the following technology…and it can be a mixed bag of tech to reach everyone.
- MULTICAST – Any number of LAN User can access LIVE streams if that network is utilizing mutlicast (pretty common). In multicast the edget switch replicated packets and forwards to ports that are requesting. So..if 30 people on a group switch wanted to watch CNN it would only pull one stream across the WAN.
- REFLECTING Streams can be unicast(one stream) across the WAN to a LAN than reflected (repacketized in multicast) if the WAN link does not support multicast.
- UNICAST in a non-multicast capable network (smaller networks) you can utilize regular unicast. In which case it does become a math equation. Number of concurrent users, vs. available bandwidth. Again if the encoder providing CNN was on the same switch as the majority of the viewers then this is not an issue.
- HYBRID Parts of the network are multicast, some are not. Some offices are remote with a T-1 inbetween. You can multicast locally, transmit a unicast over the WAN to the remore office, and then multicast again locally. No WAN, we can do the same thing using the Internet as a WAN backbone (great for field employees). Our systems allow for all of those network environments and utilizes an intelligent video networking engine to guarantee that the viewers are only have access to local resources.
YouTube is strictly Internet and stricly unicast. This means you have to worry about the amount of available INTERNET bandwidth and LAN bandwidth. With VBrick and an Enterprise solution you have lots of distribution options that are designed to alleviate any pressure on the network.
Five years ago this would be a different story.
Are you planning any integration with the new Sametime Meetings (not yet released)? e.g. you are running some training via Powerpoint and then play a video.