How to optimize corporate video streaming in your environment?
Recently one of my enterprise customers tried to deploy Silverlight corporate videos which are streamed from Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 with Windows Media Services to all the intranet users. They experienced some bandwidth issues when the videos are accessed across the WAN link. Here are some recommendations when you encounter similar issues.
1. Each video screen is opening up one connection. Hence, only stream videos whenever you need it/them. It looks good to have multiple video thumbnails on a web page but that would consume bandwidth. Each open video stream would constitute one session. 5 open video streams would mean 5 concurrent videos being streamed down from the server to the client.
2. Fine tune the settings/configurations at Windows Server 2008 to cap the bandwidth for each session so that more users can view the videos concurrently with reasonable resolution (bandwidth throttling).
3. Encode the videos with the appropriate bit rate using Microsoft Expression Encoder.
4. Place satellite servers, these are replicas of the main server placed on site and use DNS with Netmask to do round robin DNS lookup.
5. Add cache servers at each office site.
6. Implement QoS tagging on network.
7. Recommended to use real time type of networks.
