Study: Movie trailers drain corporate bandwidth

By Susan Rush
from CED Broadband Direct, June 17, 2002

Movie-goers may look forward to windfall of summer blockbusters, but corporate IT directors may only view them as bandwidth drains.

Streaming media Web sites, which include online movie trailers, are on the rise, up 412 percent in the last 12 months, according to new research from Websense Inc., an employee management solution provider. This has led to 400,000 Web pages in total featuring movie trailer clips.

It may seem innocent enough for workers to log on to get a glimpse of the MIBII or Austin Powers in Goldmember, but Websense has found that if just three employees were to stream a 4 Mbps movie trailer simultaneously, a corporate Internet connection could quickly become overburdened. This reportedly will get worse once more video-on-demand services are rolled out.

To assist corporations in reigning in their employees, Websense has introduced Premium Group II, a program designed to enable IT departments to limit employees' use of streaming media by time-based quota, time of day, user/group or block access altogether.