Streaming Media Results in Sluggish Networks
Over the past few weeks, your corporate network might have seemed a little sluggish, delivering applications, including video, a little more slowly than usual. Perhaps it too fell prey to March Madness, the excitement and hoopla surrounding the annual men’s and women’s NCAA Basketball Tournaments. That’s right; employees were likely streaming full games or game highlights over the corporate network as they cheered on their favorite teams, or at least those in their bracket.
And while you might not be interested in preserving the quality of the video for these types of users, there’s enough legitimate use of streaming online media at your company you are interested in preserving. The creation and use of online media in explainer videos, training documents, and marketing programs are common examples. Additionally, there are specific examples of critically important streaming of real-time media, such as: company earnings calls, CEO speeches, video conferencing and events hosted by public relations and investor relations teams.
(Are your media streams still running a bit slow? You can run a free Streaming Media Test.)
Protecting the Media Stream
Regardless of how your company uses streaming media, media stream monitoring is a requirement to protect the performance, integrity and availability of video streaming services. Because online media streams come in multiple online stream formats and codecs across browser platforms, a robust media stream monitoring solution that monitors content from the perspective of the end user is required.
The most effective way to do this is to consistently test your media stream network by connecting, performing buffering, playing video and disconnecting. The data collected is analyzed for connection time, buffering time, received packages, buffering packages frame rate, and average bytes per second. If any of these aspects of the media stream monitoring surpass thresholds, alerts are sent to the IT team, who can then drill down in the easy-to-read charts and data to quickly locate and repair issues.
Check out these two tools available to help analyze the availability and performance of your media streaming: Streaming Media Server Monitoring for consistent monitoring and a free Streaming Media Test you can use to review the current status of media streaming on your network.
