By Darian Germain
Last week, our long-time peering partner – Peer5 – announced that it had been acquired by Microsoft.
Peer5 may not be a household name, but here at MediaPlatform, they’ve been an important partner for more than three years when we made the investment to integrate their peering capabilities as an integral part of our Broadcaster live webcasting platform.
So why do we see the Microsoft acquisition of Peer5 as such a turning point? Because until video use exploded when Covid-19 forced remote working, most companies didn’t really think they needed to worry about having an eCDN solution to handle employee video. Microsoft’s recognition – driven no doubt by insistent customer demand – that it needed to have its own eCDN as part of Teams/Office365 is massive validation that enterprise video has become so ubiquitous that it’s breaking traditional networks and overwhelming bandwidth.
We couldn’t be more thrilled; many of us streaming video veterans have been waiting for one of the technology behemoths to make this kind of commitment for decades. Corporate video for everyone, per Microsoft, has finally arrived.
We are particularly thrilled that Microsoft chose Peer5 because of how deeply we’ve connected our platform with Peer5’s WebRTC delivery capabilities. Our integration is unique and will deliver significant value for Microsoft enterprise customers post-acquisition. Here’s how.
Large enterprises need to deploy video delivery that is as redundant and failsafe as their other enterprise infrastructure – and that means they can’t afford to have only one video delivery solution. Fortune 500 companies use Broadcaster’s Smartpath overlay routing intelligence to design detailed, granular video delivery options with layers of failover schema to ensure that every viewer – whether in a corporate location or on Wi-Fi at their home office – gets the best possible live video experience based on their network connection and device.
We integrated Peer5 directly into Smartpath to give customers more control over enterprise video delivery. Here are some actual cases we’ve supported for our joint customers:
- Peer5 primary delivery to specified IP ranges, with unicast as the primary stream for others
- Failover from Peer5 delivery to unicast or Edge delivery when poor network conditions (mobile devices for example) block peering set up
- Peer5 delivery to specified IP ranges while routing other IP addresses to MediaPlatform Edge devices, often used to deliver video to locations with insufficient bandwidth
- Peer5 delivery for CDN users within a specific metro area/PoP where their home office locations may be highly concentrated, reducing CDN charges
- The ability to synchronize Peer5 peering analytics – by passing Broadcaster internal IP user IDs to Peer5 – with our Virtual Business Intelligence (VBI) webcast quality of service analytics to diagnose viewer issues from a single vantage point and streamline troubleshooting.
Additionally, the more Microsoft makes it easier for large enterprises to share video, the sooner they’ll need to address massive and growing security, content management, and analytics requirements. They’ll also quickly recognize that their most important live virtual events need a much higher level of production and branding quality than their meeting software can deliver. And when they do, we’ll be here waiting for them.