Open standards have a way of leapfrogging proprietary solutions over the long term. We are really seeing this transformation in the Enterprise, as the range of capabilities of the H.264 standard has begun to surpass older proprietary streaming technologies. Let’s take a look at what H.264 brings to video streaming.
In the area of video quality, H.264 is leading the way, now that affordable high definition 1080p encoders are hitting the market. Our customers are looking for scalable resolutions from their encoders, so the same unit can be configured to stream to a room, desktop, or smartphone displays. Others are asking for multi-bit rate encoding, so clients on low, medium, or high network connections all will enjoy the same quality viewing experience.
Intelligent video distribution is another concern. It’s no longer enough to have a great encoder; you also need to distribute that video reliably anywhere inside or outside the network. Unicast to multicast conversion and dedicated reflectors can really help reduce WAN bandwidth usage in this area. Scalability used to be a big issue for some large or multinational customers. Video worked well on the corporate LAN, but not as well in the field. Now multicasting, reflecting, caching, and intelligent distribution are making this issue fade into the distance.
The Enterprise media portal is a hot area where H.264 convergence is happening. Corporations are using these portals to drive corporate communications, training, and other collaboration applications. Portals can be integrated with Microsoft’s SharePoint, Office Communications Server, or a third party Learning Management System. Newer video portals support H.264 content natively; some can even transcode legacy Windows Media and MPEG videos into H.264 or Flash video. Using H.264, there’s convergence between streaming, rich media, videoconferencing, Unified Communications, and digital signage systems.
One notable success we’ve had is the delivery of corporate video to viewers on the public Internet. The workflow, security, and desktop support issues involved with this have been challenging; we’ve simplified the entire process and made it more seamless. Standardizing on H.264 and Flash encoded content goes a long way towards simplifying this issue, as these formats can be played on virtually every desktop and mobile device. For Internet-delivered webinars and videos, customers are looking for better management, branding, monetization, and reporting tools. Some want a fully cloud-based service. Others want to partition service administration by roles or area of responsibility. In the past, Internet playback disruptions happened too often, even with CDNs. With a number of the newer H.264 delivery mechanisms like HTTP and Smooth Streaming, the viewing experience is much better, giving users better consistency and more responsive DVR-like capabilities.
We expect that the next year or two will bring further industry standardization on H.264. The advantages of higher video quality, flexible media portal and greater reach through the Internet not only outweigh current standards, but will continue to evolve and be embraced by large enterprises.
The only part I would add here is H.264 at broadband data rates, isn’t better than existing codecs. H.264′s main premise was that at lower bit rates such as content on mobile devices, the CODEC would out perform others. That being said, it’s clearly a standard now regardless of the 3 different implementations from MSFT, Adobe and Job’s shop.