Streaming Media Enterprise Newsletter

By Jose Alvear
July 27, 2001

On the heels of Inktomi's aggressive move into the enterprise space, Digital Pipe and enScaler join forces to help manage, secure and distribute corporate content.

In the world of enterprise streaming, it's difficult to know who's in charge when doing a live or on-demand webcast. After all, many companies don't have a "streaming manager". Is it the responsibility of each department that's initiating the webcast, or should the IT department have final say on all streaming events? Solving this conundrum is at the heart of a deal announced last week between Digital Pipe and enScaler.

The deal will combine the enterprise streaming delivery capabilities of Digital Pipe with a new enterprise-focused digital asset management solution from enScaler.

enScaler (www.enscaler.com) built its base on a digital rights/subscription service, designed to enable entertainment companies to sell and manage content. One of its major customers, Digital Island, uses the system to manage live and on-demand pay-per-view events and subscription services. Now, enScaler is turning to the corporate market with its just-unveiled mediaEnterprise solution.

The combination of Digital Pipe and enScaler makes a nice fit, said Dan McCrary, director of product marketing at enScaler. "Digital Pipe handles the network and infrastructure, and we sit on top of that," he said. Whereas Digital Pipe targets the IT manager, mediaEnterprise was created for content producers. "There was nothing for those two groups to combine resources," he said.

McCrary said mediaEnterprise helps companies manage and distribute their content, using a Web-based interface. Content producers upload the media into the central repository, where they can then add intelligence to it. "You can provide business rules, use digital rights management, select who the audience is, to keep a consistency of content," he said.

With solutions for entertainment and enterprise customers, enScaler is weighing in on both sides of the streaming equation. McCrary said it is important to note the differences between the two sectors. Entertainment companies, he said, are looking to monetize content, while enterprise customers are primarily looking at cost reduction and productivity enhancements.

McCrary said that with mediaEnterprise, companies won't have to bother the IT department to help upload and manage streaming content. "[Often] the IT department is the bottleneck," he said. "Some users had to jump through 200 hoops and still didn't know how to get a streaming event started. We help them focus on creating content and managing content."

Digital Pipe's New Direction

Meanwhile, Digital Pipe (www.digitalpipe.com) is shifting away from its managed services focus, toward a revenue model driven more significantly by hardware and software sales.

The reason for this move, according to vice president of marketing Fabrizio Ornani, is that enterprise customers have begun demanding greater in-house control. "They want control so they can designate a manager to manage the distribution," he said. He added that Digital Pipe can still provide some outsourcing services to help with integration or help produce events, but that this will not be the company's core business anymore. "Technology is the center stage," he said.

Ornani said Digital Pipe's technology provides a plug-and-play capability, so customers don't need to do any manual configurations. "Enterprises can set up their own private CDN (or iCDN) to distribute and deliver the content," said Ornani.

So far, Digital Pipe's solution is geared for on-demand events. Ornani said that among Digital Pipe's customers, on-demand content is more popular than live events. "Live [events are the] initial hook to enter, but on-demand is the application that's starting to gain over live," he said.

Digital Pipe is not alone in this field, however. "Our big competition is Inktomi," said Ornani, "since they have a content networking overlay system." Last week, Inktomi made announcements saying it was moving squarely into the enterprise streaming space, and acquired eScene, a provider of content management solutions. The Digital Pipe/enScaler combination is a direct hit at Inktomi.

But talk is cheap: Despite the announcements, neither enScaler nor Digital Pipe has customers using the combined system. Inktomi, meanwhile, said that Ford, Morgan Stanley and Williams Communications have deployed Inktomi’s caching and search solutions.

McCrary said mediaEnterprise is available separately from Digital Pipe's offering, but naturally, the two companies are hoping the market will see them as a complete solution. "For a majority of enterprise customer needs, they're looking for a platform they can grow into and scale," said McCrary.

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UNC Medicine Does the Rounds with Streaming

By Daisy Whitney
July 25, 2001

After years of televising lectures, the University of North Carolina's School of Medicine decided to put the seminars online, integrating webcasting capabilities into the TV production flow. Doctors save on travel and get back to taking care of patients. Contributor Daisy Whitney reports.

Anyone who's watched the clock in a doctor's waiting room knows that physicians can be very busy. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill understands that, too, and that's why its School of Medicine began offering "grand rounds" seminars online earlier this year.

The school has been televising lectures and seminars on a closed-circuit broadcast to distant hospitals and clinics around the state for 10 years, but decided to add Web capabilities in January to expand the range, and to allow for viewing on demand. According to David Matney, director of the video engineering group at the UNC School of Medicine, the webcast is designed to accommodate the incredibly hectic schedules of most physicians. "They can sit in their office and see it live or see it archived," Matney said.

Since the statewide school system has campuses and medical centers around the state, doctors find it impossible for doctors to return to a central campus each week for a lecture. Mandatory seminars to review case studies and medical procedures, known as grand rounds, cost doctors lots of time. After 10 years of telecasts, webcasts seemed a logical extension of the school's telemedicine capabilities, said Matney.

"Residents in outlying areas attend through TV. That's the advantage of TV. They don't have to come to the medical center to attend. So the natural outgrowth of that is webcasting. We simulcast on TV and webcast at the same time, so physicians don't have to attend at the time of the actual event."

Such high-tech dissemination of information is made possible at UNC by the information networks established by the state of North Carolina. The state built the North Carolina Information Highway, an ISDN network operating at 768Kbps in both directions. In addition, the UNC system is connected on a private network known as the MCNC network, a hybrid system based on MPEG-2 and microwave technology. The school relies on both networks for its distance education seminars and conferences. "It's part of our residency training program," explained Matney.

Looking for a Stream Partner

Because the televised seminars are so intrinsic to the school's multimedia distance education philosophy, Matney looked long and hard for a webcasting partner that could link up with its existing video production facilities. UNC chose e-StudioLive's solution, since it combines the video and Web worlds in which Matney's vision resided. "The fact that it worked with a video production switcher made it totally unique," he said.

e-StudioLive (www.estudiolive.com), based in Chelmsford, Mass., has been in business for 30 years and was formally known as ECHOlab, which remains the brand name of its video switchers. According to chief executive officer Ken Swanton, the company decided to computerize its switches in 1999 and integrate them with a workstation to make a platform on which to create and host live webcasts. Currently, e-Studio sells its webcasting solution for $25,000 to $150,000, depending on the configuration. The turnkey system includes a Pentium workstation, a streaming server and a control panel for the cameras.

"We sell a studio that's live and for the Internet," said Swanton. This sort of seamless convergence between video production and the Web is essential for UNC, since the seminars originated as broadcast events. "We are trying to make a transition in the way we do communication from a closed-circuit TV network to a more conventional data network, so it's matter of interfacing the video network into a data network," said Matney.

The TV presentation usually cuts between two outputs — a camera on the speaker and a video signal attached to a computer that converts slides or PowerPoint into video. "The output is fed to the information highway and then is also sent to the webcasting facility at the same time," said Matney.

The online version of the event offers several viewing options. Any media that is used during the lecture is shown in a video window, while a graphic window allows for the display of additional images in a JPEG form. The graphic window permits a higher image resolution. Viewers can select which window they want to watch, or they can watch both at the same time. Since many medical images necessitate high resolution, the graphic window is a useful tool, said Matney.

Both the telecast and webcast allow for traditional classroom repartee. Distance TV audiences can ask questions during the seminar through the bi-directional TV system, which includes cameras in the remote viewing locations. Web audiences can submit questions online, which are then routed to the presenter's computer. UNC encodes and webcasts in RealNetworks video; the school owns about 200 RealPlayer licenses.

Webcasting Works

Aside from webcasting live events, UNC is also looking at other initiatives. Three years ago, the school began converting its video library to 255Kbps compressed video to make it accessible over the Internet. Matney said that about 25 to 30 percent of the UNC's archives are available. Additionally, the school is currently using Internet Protocol video technology for telemedicine and continuing education applications.

Getting the webcasting operation up and running wasn't cheap — but it cost considerably less than the closed circuit TV system. The school spent $65,000 on the e-StudioLive solution, while the TV system cost more than $1 million. The relative savings is significant when taking into account the breadth of new functionality the webcasting component adds. But Matney's primary concern is not financial. "We're not in this to make money," he said. "We are here to provide training and education to physicians and residents."

When looking at the overall project, Matney said it was obvious that the TV side would merge with the streaming world, especially given the large pipes that are already installed at many universities. "That's why webcasting is so successful in an environment like this. We have good data connections," he said.

In the future, Matney said he'd like to offer continuing education and telemedicine capabilities to home users. He also expects to include interactive webcasting of curriculum materials to medical students in the classroom, possibly as early as this fall.

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