Case Study: Conference Producer Employs Kontiki's "Peerless" VOD Solution

Rangaswami's Sand Hill Group used Kontiki to capture and deliver video from the sessions at its Software 2004 conference. The purpose was twofold, according to Rangaswami. First, Sand Hill wanted to capture the session content so it could be viewed later by conference participants who missed a session for one reason or another. But just as important was the promotional benefit. "We wanted to spread the word for next year's event," says Rangaswami. "We wanted to build brand-name recognition."

The Software 2004 conference took place March 1-2 at the San Francisco Marriott. Because session audiences were slated to be as large as 2,000, Sand Hill had already decided to hire an A/V crew so that video of the presenters could be projected onto a big screen for the benefit of attendees seated towards the rear of the room.

Kontiki sent one support person who worked with Sand Hill’s A/V crew to get the video into a laptop (encoded to Windows Media format) and to synchronize the video with the slides on the fly. The crew captured eight hours of video and slides and burned the files onto two CDs. The video of the sessions could have been published online within minutes. For business strategy reasons, however, Sand Hill had already decided not to offer the videos too soon—otherwise, what’s the incentive to attend the live conference event? They decided to wait a week before making the videos available from their Web site via Kontiki's hosting service.

Rangaswami was impressed by Koniki's ability to synchronize video and slides quickly and easily. This is done with a Kontiki plug-in for Microsoft Producer 2003 that offers "one-button" publishing into the Kontiki Delivery Management System (DMS), the software at the heart of the Kontiki solution. This allows all the files in the Producer presentation to be packaged into one easy-to-use file that can then be securely shared (using a Web interface) with other online viewers using the Kontiki DMS.

Rangaswami also praised the way Kontiki's peer-to-peer technology can actually increase the delivery speed as files jump from peer PC to peer PC. "The more that people in a company request the video file, the faster it transfers," he says.

Essentially, this happens because Kontiki monitors the response time and available bandwidth of each computer in the network that is serving the file and adaptively requests more data from the computers that can provide the best throughput. Kontiki calls this "adaptive rate multiserving."

Kontiki marketing vice president Chris Saito calls this "the popularity paradox." While most networks get slower as more users log on, with Kontiki, the network gets faster. "As more and more people request a particular file, the system gets more serving capacity," he says. In addition, Kontiki uses the aforementioned edge caching to distribute content from a local Web server to caching servers that are closer to the end user, or nearer to the "edge."

Sand Hill's Rangaswami is oblivious to how the Kontiki system does what it does. He just knows that Kontiki is doing what he wants it to—keeping his life simple. "I've never had to answer a support telephone call," he says. Which probably means it’s simplified his clients’ lives, too.