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TOP OF THE NEWS
Damming the stream Faced with a streaming media
flood, vendors
are devising intelligent ways to allocate precious
network
resources
Lynda Radosevich and Emily Fitzloff
03/02/98
InfoWorld
For a TV generation, captivated by sound and moving
pictures, the
advent of streaming technologies to efficiently
deliver audio, animation,
and video content to Web sites is a good thing.
But multimedia files, particularly video, can be huge
whether they're
streamed or not, leading network managers to balk at
clogging their
intranet and Internet LANs and WANs with multimedia
content.
However, vendors from all corners of the industry are
converging on the
network issue to bring multimedia to both corporate
intranets and the
Internet.
"The number one issue is the bandwidth concern," said
Seema Williams,
an analyst at Forrester Research, in Cambridge, Mass.
Streaming is a technique that allows users to play
content while they're
still receiving it, rather than waiting to download
huge files in one chunk.
Streaming media, and video in particular, causes
bandwidth headaches
because it takes place with no feedback as to the
congestion it might be
causing. Often this bottleneck can affect
mission-critical applications.
"Network performance is suffering because of problems
caused by
video," said Bob Quillin, vice president of marketing
at Packeteer, a
bandwidth-management software company in Cupertino,
Calif. "People
have gone from two-second to one-minute response
times, and their
screens are freezing up on them."
Vendors, including Microsoft, RealNetworks , and
Cisco, are well
aware of the problem and are devising intelligent
ways to manage
precious network resources for users faced with a
streaming-media
flood. The goal is to quell network managers' qualms
about supporting
streaming media applications on intranet and Internet
Web sites.
RealNetworks and Netscape, for example, authored a
Real Time
Streaming Protocol (RTSP), which is in the last
stages of approval by the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). If all goes
according to plan, the
IETF will formally accept RTSP within weeks and the
protocol will show
up in the next revision of RealVideo and RealAudio,
said Philip Rosedale,
vice president of media systems at RealNetworks in
Seattle.
RTSP, which works on top of the well-established Real
Time Transport
Protocol, has many functions. In terms of bandwidth
reduction, it
standardizes a way of compressing header information
on streaming
video packets traveling between modem-bank terminal
adapters and the
Internet's routers. It also provides a means of
reducing network latency
when users start, stop, rewind, or fast-forward
streamed audio and
video, Rosedale said.
Silicon Graphics plans to support RTSP. Its MediaBase
video server will
let IT managers who have RTSP-aware routers reserve
specific amounts
of bandwidth for RTSP traffic, said Marc Trimuschat,
product line
manager for WebForce at Silicon Graphics in Mountain
View, Calif.
But it will take a while before RTSP becomes widely
enough deployed in
routers to be mainstream.
"In the long term, it's the right solution. In the
short term, it's a ways off,"
Trimuschat said.
Meanwhile, Silicon Graphics will partner with vendors
such as Packeteer
and Xedia to provide load balancing with MediaBase
3.0 by this July,
Trimuschat said.
Microsoft, which has not said much about RTSP, is
attacking the
bandwidth problem by building Vxtreme's compression
technology and
network delivery technology into its NetShow 3.0
Internet video server,
due out before July, said Gary Schare, lead product
manager for
Netshow at Microsoft.
Using NetShow 3.0, IT managers will be able to limit
the server's output
to a specified number of bits per second. NetShow 3.0
also will include
intelligent streaming, which is the capability of
encoding at two different
bit rates for a single file. That way, if a modem
connection is slow, the
server feeds streams at a lower rate, Schare said.
A new breed of Internet service providers are
assaulting the bandwidth
issue by targeting distributed Web hosting services
at multimedia content.
The services point Web traffic to the network hub
closest to the user's
location, thereby reducing the number of router hops
a packet must make
and circumventing the already jammed national and
international Internet
backbones.
San Diego-based InterVU offers a distributed network
service
specifically to optimize bandwidth for Internet and
intranet video delivery.
The company hosted an Intel streaming-video Web
commercial during
the Super Bowl that used JavaScripts to point video
requests to servers
that in turn pointed requests to the most available
video delivery server.
Using this technique, InterVU was able to deliver
400,000 videos during
30 minutes, said Brian Kenner, InterVU's chief
technology officer.
ISP Exodus Communications, in Santa Clara, Calif.,
will unveil Multipath,
a distributed Web content service, at Internet World
in Los Angeles later
this month, said Bob Bowman, director of engineering
at Exodus.
Multipath is a harbinger of new ISP services that use
Cisco's
DistributedDirector router software to distribute
Internet loads among
multiple, geographically dispersed servers, which
will make streaming
media much more attractive, Bowman expects.
"We're seeing massive amounts of growth in Internet
multimedia,"
Bowman said.
An additional aid to Internet multimedia bandwidth
limitations is multicast
IP, which allows multiple users to "tune" in to one
audio of video stream.
In contrast, unicast requires content servers to feed
individual streams to
each user, and traffic piles up quickly as multiple
users tap a site.
As a result of the cost and unpredictable nature of
the Internet, streaming
multimedia vendors are focusing on corporate intranet
applications where
network pipes are wider and It managers can better
control usage.
Adaptive Media, for instance, offers Envision
Enterprise, a high-quality,
video-streaming package that delivers just-in-time
training and other
video applications via corporate intranets. The
Envision server gathers
information about the video playback capability of
the client and
fine-tunes the stream for the client. It can also
scale high-quality MPEG1
video streams down to as little as 64Kbps, and it
gives IT managers tools
to regulate the maximum delivery stream heading out
on their networks,
said Michael Pliner, president and CEO of Adaptive
Media in Sunnyvale,
Calif.
Likewise, bandwidth-management providers, such as
Packeteer, Ipsilon
and Xedia, let IT managers release streaming video --
as well as other
network throttlers -- into intranets safely and
predictably, without
performance degradation.
According to Karen Barton, vice president of
marketing at Xedia, in
Littleton, Mass., "the key here is control. Network
administrators need to
have explicit control over what types of data get how
much bandwidth.
They need to ensure that streaming applications don't
take more than
their share so that they can protect and uphold
service-level agreements."
At least one service provider has found
bandwidth-management solutions
from both Packeteer and Xedia sufficient for
bandwidth allocation.
Cupertino, Calif.-based Concentric Networks does Web
hosting for an
interactive television service, Bloomberg TV, that
was launched last year.
Concentric Networks uses Xedia's Access Point product
to define the
amount of bandwidth available for video streaming and
for creating
reports on how much bandwidth was used.
The Internet multimedia market is starting to mature
and consolidate as
evinced by RealNetwork's purchase of streaming-video
tools vendor
Vivo Software last week, and Microsoft's purchase of
VXtreme last
August.
But streaming multimedia has a way to go before it
becomes
commonplace. Live and on-demand audio and video
capabilities are
used on less than 1 percent of Web sites, according
to Microsoft's
estimates.
Cutting-edge users have to put up with jerky playback
caused by
bandwidth problems. Mary Doan, worldwide director of
client service
applications at New York advertising company Saatchi
& Saatchi,
travels to Europe to demonstrate and set up Saatchi &
Saatchi's video
intranet application and runs into Internet clogs
regularly.
"If it is the morning in London, you can download
this stuff pretty fast,"
Doan said. "Once the afternoon comes, and the U.S. is
awake on the
Internet, it is a lot slower."
By letting IT manager get a better grip on bandwidth,
vendors are
opening the doors for richer Internet and intranet
Web content. Early
adopters are finding compelling applications ranging
from Web
advertising to corporate training for audio/video in
particular.
At Saatchi & Saatchi, employees and clients can view
streamed video
clips of TV ads from a password-protected extranet
site. The company
uses InterVU to host the intranet, so it was able to
launch the application
without first building a supporting infrastructure.
"We get tremendous cost savings from not having to
fly brains around the
world," Doan said.
Managing multimedia bandwidth
Vendors are attacking multimedia's voracious
bandwidth requirements on
several fronts.
* Video-player companies: RealNetworks is promoting
the Real Time
Streaming Protocol (RTSP) with new compression and
management
capabilities; Microsoft's NetShow 3.0 will include
intelligent streaming
that encodes single files at two different bit rates.
* New service providers: InterVU, Exodus, and other
ISPs offer
distributed servers so users get local performance.
* Bandwidth-management vendors: Adaptive, Packeteer,
Ipsilon, and
Xedia let IS managers allocate a specific bit rate
for multimedia streams
on intranets.
Sorry about the size folks, If anyone here is truly a long term investor, you might want to get into this one ;>) |
