What is Throughput Manager by Hive Streaming?
The new Hive Throughput Manager solution is a valuable tool for managing live event streaming to locations with limited bandwidth capabilities. By providing an additional layer of control, Hive Throughput Manager allows to restrict the number of users who can access the stream directly from the CDN.
This is especially useful for companies with locations where internet connections present challenges and can result in poor video experiences during live event streaming. With the Hive Throughput Manager solution, businesses can ensure a smoother and more reliable streaming experience for their audiences, even in low-bandwidth network environments.
Why is Hive Streaming releasing the Throughput Manager solution now?
- A significant number of our customers are large enterprises with multiple offices across the world, including in countries with notoriously challenging internet links, like China or India.
- Our Product teams maintain a continuous dialogue with customers and, as result, have recognized a growing need for a solution that would help manage live event streaming in challenging environments, providing employees of customer organizations with a smoother and more reliable video experience.
- In addition to customer demand, Hive’s commitment to helping organizations improve their digital employee experience has also been a driving force behind the development of the Throughput Manager solution. By providing businesses with the tools they need to effectively manage live event streaming, Hive is helping to improve the overall digital employee experience and meet the demands set by the modern digital workplace.
How does Hive Throughput Manager work in low-bandwidth network environments?
Hive Throughput Manager addresses video streaming challenges in restricted network conditions by ensuring stable and consistent video quality for all viewers.
With Hive Throughput Manager, organizations can effortlessly ensure a stable-quality video experience in even the most low-bandwidth network environments.
The Throughput Manager solution is designed to limit the number of users who can directly access a stream from the CDN, providing an extra layer of control that is particularly useful when live events are being streamed to locations with limited bandwidth capabilities.
By utilizing this solution, businesses can ensure a smoother and more reliable streaming experience, even in extreme network environments.
How does the solution developed by Hive Streaming differ from other market players?
There are a few key differentiators, but perhaps the two most important ones are:
1) Proprietary, patented technology
The underlying technology of Hive Throughput Manager is fully proprietary, and has been granted patents in Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, and China.
2) Absolutely no need for hardware
Throughput Manager is a fully Cloud-based solution that requires absolutely no hardware to either activate or manage.
With other market vendors, it is sometimes the case that a solution is advertised as requiring no extra/specific hardware to run, but it still involves a more complicated deployment process where the customer organization has to use their own existing data center or server room to store the content before it can reach end-user devices.
With Hive, any customer who is already using Hive eCDN can simply log in and manage the amount of bandwidth used at a specific site directly in our system
What is a typical use case for Hive’s Throughput Manager?
Suppose an organization only has 1Mbps available for streaming at a particular office location. What the solution would then do is create 4 streams at 250kbps each, allowing all employees at that office location to watch video in that stable quality, all while only having 4 devices going back to the CDN to fetch content throughout the live event.
What’s more, these 4 devices (employee machines) will be chosen dynamically, so if one of them becomes disconnected or if there is a different set of people at the office that day, our intelligent algorithm will easily manage this and identify a different 4 machines as the primary stream sources.
The bottom line: Hive Throughput Manager can ensure that the entire stream will not consume more than the 1Mbps available at this particular site, which means all viewers will be able to watch the live stream without interruptions, and in consistent quality.
What are the key benefits of Throughput Manager?
Hive Throughput Manager provides greater control over bandwidth usage, improves network reliability and resiliency, simplifies deployment and management, reduces costs, and optimizes performance.
Here are several of its key benefits:
1) No deployment required
Hive Streaming customers who are already using the Hive Video Optimization solution do not need to deploy any additional software in order to use the solution. Once enabled on the Hive side, Throughput Manager is immediately ready to use by the customer.
2) Granular control
Strict controls over the amount of bandwidth used for video streaming, ensuring that the network site or enterprise office is not overwhelmed with traffic. This helps to improve the quality of the video streaming experience and ensures that the video stream is delivered reliably.
3) No single point of failure
The solution is designed to be fully distributed, which means that there is no single point of failure. This helps to improve the reliability and resiliency of the video stream.
4) AI-powered auto-configuration
Hive Throughput Manager is designed to self-organize to the configured network structure, without requiring the rollout of virtual machines or hardware, or any operations integration. This makes it easy to activate and manage, even in complex network environments.
5) True edge functionality
The solution leverages viewers’ machines for distributing video, which eliminates the need for maintenance and additional hardware/software. This helps to reduce the cost and complexity of corporate video streaming.
6) Consolidation of multi-bitrate video sources
The solution consolidates multi-bitrate video sources to reduce splintering and concentrate the usage, minimizing the number of video streams. This helps to optimize the use of available bandwidth and improve the overall performance.
Apart from this, one benefit that can be highlighted is that strict controls over the amount of bandwidth used for video streaming can be sustainable because it can help prevent network congestion and ensure that available bandwidth is distributed more evenly among users.
How can Throughput Manager contribute to corporate sustainability efforts?
When a large number of users simultaneously stream videos, it can consume a significant amount of bandwidth and lead to slower network speeds or even network outages. This can negatively impact the productivity and efficiency of an enterprise, as well as cause frustration among employees.
By implementing strict controls over the amount of bandwidth allocated for video streaming, an enterprise can limit the amount of bandwidth available for this activity, which can help prevent network congestion and ensure that bandwidth is available for other important tasks such as running business-critical applications.
Furthermore, this approach can also be sustainable from a resource consumption perspective. By reducing unnecessary bandwidth usage, it can lead to lower energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions from data centers, which can contribute to a more sustainable IT infrastructure.
What are some key benefits and outcomes for companies using Throughput Manager?
The most obvious outcome is, perhaps, improved user experience.
By providing fine-grained controls over video streaming, Hive Throughput Manager ensures that the video stream is delivered reliably and in stable quality. This could lead to improved digital employee experience and satisfaction, particularly in extreme environments where network conditions may be less reliable – at corporate office locations in countries like India or China, for example.
A few other benefits include:
- Hardware and maintenance cost savings: The solution’s distributed operation feature leverages viewers’ machines for distributing video, eliminating the need for hardware and reducing maintenance costs. This could result in significant cost savings for the enterprise, particularly if it currently has a large number of dedicated video streaming servers.
- Increased employee engagement: With a more reliable and high-quality video streaming solution, employees can participate in video conferences, webinars, and training sessions without disruptions. This could lead to increased engagement and better collaboration among employees, which has a proven positive impact on business outcomes.
- Better allocation of IT resources: The solution’s self-organizing feature means that it can be deployed quickly and easily without the need for additional hardware or operations integration. This could save time and resources for the IT team, allowing them to focus on other important tasks, and help the enterprise to lower its IT infrastructure costs and reallocate resources to other important areas of the business.