Flash Videos - an efficient tool to update and upgrade ebw workforce

How it all began?

Two years back, at ebusinessware, we started a new initiative of recording videos and covering all  important Meetings, training sessions and corporate presentations conducted by our SMEs, Sales and Marketing people. The intention was to ensure that our large pool of technical experts is able to benefit from such sessions, whether they are of junior or senior level.

And currently…

Now, the SMEs do not have to spend their quality time in providing the same training to different groups, in different sessions, and on different days. They can focus their energy and time and on other high priority issues/ assignments after recording just one session in front of camera. On the other hand, ebw employees also benefited with the availability of such training sessions on UniFacebook 24X7X365 a year. We realized that one of the best and simplest ways to convey our message to our employees was through videos on UniFacebook. Ebusinessware’s Information Architecture team was selected to ensure that these events are properly shot, edited and uploaded on UniFacebook.

Solution:

We are using Flash video format to upload our video recordings/ files on UniFacebook. Why??

In a survey conducted in May 2008, 14.2 crore internet users watched around 1200 crore video clips, spending an average of 3.50 hours per month watching video’s online. With 84% of online videos viewed using Adobe Flash technology, Flash is the number-one format for video on the web. Flash Video is a file format used to deliver video over the Internet using Adobe Flash Player. Notable users of the Flash Video format include YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo! Video, Reuters.com, cnbc.com, foxnews.com, Minyanville Inc, and our very own UniFacebook.

Benefits of Flash Streaming Videos :
The video starts playing sooner than it does using other approaches.
It provides better tracking, reporting, and logging ability—important features for industries such as video ad serving.

Streaming uses less of the client’s memory and disk space, because the clients don’t need to download the entire file.

• It makes  up for more efficient use of network resources, because only the parts of the video that are viewed are sent to the client.
• It provides more secure delivery of media, because media does not get saved to the client’s cache when streamed. Flash Media Server also allows for encrypted streaming, providing an additional level of security.
• It allows us to deliver and record live video and audio, or capture video from a client’s webcam or digital video camera.
• It enables multiway and multiuser streaming for creating video chat, video messaging, and video conferencing applications.
• It provides programmatic control of streams (server scripting) for the creation of server-side playlists, synchronization of streams, smarter delivery adjusted to client connection speed, and application creation.
• It provides advanced monitoring and reporting on traffic and through-put.

Solution extended…

Having videos on important topics was not enough, soon we started to get the feedbacks on the quality and size of videos uploaded on UniFacebook. For our employees in Indian subcontinent we needed flash video files with smaller size but our collegues on onsite were not happy with the quality of small size videos. As bandwidth never was not an issue in US, UK and Singapore, we decided to implement CDN (content delivery network or content distribution network) for our onsite and offshore employees.

CDN is a system of computers networked together across the Internet that incorporates transparently to deliver content to end users, with the intention of improving performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.
The capacity sum of strategically placed servers can be higher than the network backbone capacity. This can result in an impressive increase in the number of concurrent users. For instance, when there is a 10 Gbit/s network backbone and 100 Gbit/s central server capacity, only 10 Gbit/s can be delivered. But when 10 servers are moved to 10 edge locations, total capacity can be 10*10 Gbit/s.
Strategically placed edge servers decrease the load on interconnects, public peers, private peers and backbones, freeing up capacity and lowering delivery costs. It uses the same principle as above. Instead of loading all traffic on a backbone or peer link, a CDN can offload these by redirecting traffic to edge servers.

CDN helped us in achieving our goal of updating and upgrading our workforce in the minimum possible time.