BSPs Make Streaming Work
By Matt Stump
from the June 18, 2001 issue of Broadband Week
Telephony-based broadband service providers are using their network assets to generate new revenues by capitalizing on growing audio and video streaming applications.
As corporations increasingly look to save travel costs by using streaming applications to train salespeople, communicate with employees, reach out to investors and share workflow, service providers are re-arming their streaming product portfolios.
The ILECs and major backbone providers that have weathered the telecommunications nosedive are finding their fiber backbones, local hosting and storage capabilities and contact with business and residential customers are serving them well in the growing enterprise streaming space.
Qwest Communications launched separate Internet and Enterprise Content Delivery Network initiatives earlier this year at Networld+Interop. The focus of the Enterprise CDN "is to distribute content to end users without increasing the bandwidth throughout their network," says Rod Nayfield, director of IP marketing for Qwest. "It allows customers to spend far less capital."
Qwest helps companies determine where to deploy CDN service inside their corporate WANs, Nayfield says. Qwest, itself, is a Qwest ECDN customers, Nayfield says.
Qwest's Santa Clara office is connected to the corporate Intranet via a T1 line. "If we have a 300 kpbs connection, you can't have five simultaneously viewings from that centralized source, especially if they are on different segments," Nayfield said.
By distributing content out to the edges of the network, people could view various segments of streaming training videos without hobbling the network. "It's distributed out to the edge once, then served as often as it's needed," Nayfield says.
The hospitality industry is using Qwest's ECDN to train employees on correct customer service techniques, he says. Using filmed streaming content, employees can see how they should dress and what techniques to use to solve hotel customer problems, Nayfield says.
"Without increasing IT needs significantly, you can centrally control the training curriculum," Nayfield says. New hires can view training segments on demand as they come on board, he adds.
Qwest is working with Cisco Systems on the ECDN application. The two companies estimated it would cost an enterprise $750,000 to fly 300 salespeople to a major city hotel and feed and train them for a week. Using Qwest's ECDN services, the company could train 2,000 in various locations for $100,000. And all the filmed content can be archived for later retrieval.
ECDN costs are based on the number of locations, and whether customers purchase or lease hardware, Nayfield says. A management fee also is assessed for Qwest's content management software. A key sales attribute, Nayfield says, is Qwest can supply companies backbone services, thus saving enterprises even more money.
"Companies are in a situation where they are looking to conserve capital," Nayfield says. "We're offering a solution for customer to get these capabilities on a purely operating usage basis, without huge capital expenditures. Adding streaming media to a web site is nontrivial. It's not an application where you flip the switch on your web server. You need special infrastructure and talent."
BellSouth's e-Business Centers handle the company's multi-part streaming strategy that concentrate on leveraging BellSouth's two hosting centers.
"We start with the hosting environment for other companies who want to do streaming media and tie that into the broadband access network," says Rex Adams, vice president, customer markets, BellSouth, whether that's DSL or dialup or T1 for the corporate network environment.
"We have hosting centers in Atlanta and Miami," Adams says, "and both are collocated with our 911 facility. We've added satellite dishes, additional bandwidth, and more servers" in those hosting centers to handle increased amounts of corporate data traffic.
In its nine-state region, BellSouth has 50 managed facilities and 1,600 central offices, all interconnected with fiber, which forms the basis of its regional, high speed network, Adams says. The 50 managed facilities are data hubbing points for BellSouth's DSL and Internet traffic. And as the switching network moves to digital, those 1,600 central offices will begin to look a lot more like data centers, Adams says.
"We target customers who have the greatest bandwidth needs," Adams says. The company hosts 25,000 web sites, and an increasing number of which sports audio and video applications.
"That's one reason BellSouth is very attractive to streaming media companies," Adams says. "There are opportunities to sell storage. With a typical streaming media company, there are huge storage demands. That's a huge opportunity for additional revenue and margin for BellSouth."
BellSouth counts among its customers various sports entities and Eon Streams, which films and streams out church services to the homebound or those parishoners who are far away from their native congregations.
Omega Networks is an Atlanta-based sports firm that streams amateur sports contests across the Internet. "They like our hosting center, coupled with our network connectivity," Adams says. Gaming is another streaming application BellSouth is looking at, Adams relates.
Several unnamed national sports content companies are using Bell South's hosting facilities to distribute content in the Southeast. "One sports distribution company mentioned as a competitive advantage the ability to predict geographically where the demand is going to occur and cache content appropriately," Adams says. "They will cache hockey in the Northeast and NASCAR in south."
"The way we approach the business is that it's not as a standalone hosting business," Adams says. "We approach it like a networking company. We're no longer a telephone network, we're running a computer network. We're building a nine-state LAN."
"We love the fact that more and more of the web is moving to video distribution. In that environment, the localization of the Internet begins to occur. And you get to richer and richer content and the desire to not drop any packets, the Internet becomes a local play," he says.
Adams believes BellSouth is approaching streaming "much more synergistically than the other (ILECs). There is an opportunity to sell the applications," he says, such as gaming, productivity tools and e-learning.
"We're trying to use our imbedded assets, billing, customer contacts, etc. We talk to over 100 million people a year. We bill over 20 million people a month. It's the full value chain, taking orders, handling customer calls and sending customer bills," Adams says.
SBC approaches the streaming market with a service bureau solution and customer premise solution, says Sharon Cohn, director of product marketing/collaboration services, SBC.
The service bureau solution grew out of the company's 1-800 conference call center segment established four years ago. The focus is on training, investor relations and corporate announcements, Cohn said. "We see this as an extension of conference applications," she says.
"Technology companies are embracing this overnight," Cohn says. "I'm seeing the usage grow day over day. Enterprise customers are reading about it, testing it, looking at firewall issues. This is still new and in the growth mode."
SBC charges customers on a per-event basis, based on the number of participants and customers expected over a given period of time, Cohn says. The company will create a video archive of up to 500 streams for the first 30 days for a flat amount. Usage thereafter is on a per use basis. There is also ongoing monthly costs to archive material, she says.
"The benefit of SBC is that companies don't have to invest in hardware," Cohn says. "It's a nonthreatening way for the business community to start playing with it."
SBC's CPE service "is for customers who know how to manage their network," Cohn says. Customers can buy a server and create and store content on their network, Cohn says, using SBC phone lines for transmissions.
Most businesses are still using ISDN lines, she says, despite lots of talk about IP delivery. "Most customers don't have the infrastructure in place yet," she says.
SBC's overall conference business is growing 40 percent a year, Cohn says. While the standard audio conference is still driving the most revenue, Internet and streaming application usage is increasing, Cohn says.
"The biggest area with the greatest potential is web conferencing," she says, "where you take traditional audio conferences and add private web addresses to allow people to collaborate on a document." The auto industry is an example, she says, where car designers in various locations could work on design documents using streaming applications. "The greatest growth will come from the Web tools," Cohn says.
Vyvx Broadband Media, a subsidiary of fiber backbone provider Williams Co., launched a MediaExtranet Service branch two years ago to handle anticipated needs in the streaming marketplace. Vyvx handles television transmission for hundreds of content providers across the William backbone network. Streaming is a natural outgrowth of that business, says Greg Onyszchuk, vice president of emerging markets, Vyvx Broadband Media.
"The vision was to expand our capabilities to customers to cover streaming media and file-based formats," he says. "We've all read the Jupiter studies that over the next few years enterprise streaming will be a $2.8 billion market." Does Onyszchuk believe it? "I think from an actual business model, the enterprise market doesn't suffer from the economic barriers that the consumer market faces," he says diplomatically.
"We've got a lot of business-to-business offers targeting workflow," Onyszchuk says. Vyyx recently signed a deal with corporate training company etNetworks to handle streaming training applications for IBM and Cisco Systems.
Vyvx receives content from IBM and hosts it on Vyvx media server center at its Tulsa, Okla., headquarters. Williams' 33,000-mile fiber backbone and its four teleport satellites provide connectivity across the country to etNetworks servers in various IBM and Cisco locations. "Any local office can browse the metadata through a browsing mechanism and request content," Onyszchuk says. "We get the content, ingest it, log it, and create video assets out of it. We write the metadata and load content into MediaXtranet systems. We can grow the throughput, the content stored, the number of users that can access titles." The Tulsa media center has 100 terabytes of storage that Onyszchuk says "we can scale that by a couple orders of magnitude."
Onyszchuk says one growing trend is adding rich media to today's email. Onyszchuk sees interest in streaming from the health, real estate, corporate training and entertainment fields. Ad agencies are starting to use streaming applications to send out spots nationally. Enterprise companies shooting a documentary in several locations, for instance, will send content into one local storage place where various producers can see and work on the video simultaneously.
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