P2P Caching of Stream VoD

Steel Contributor

Hi @Marc Mroz - Earlier in the year you mentioned some work that was going on to optimize Stream for Hive (and some other P2P tools).  Do you have any updates on how that work is progressing?

 

And until you deliver that - can you give an overview of how the Hive plugin works today with Stream?  (What works well, and what needs to be improved).

4 Replies

Hi @Adrian Hyde - Today we don't have any support for P2P caching solutions for Stream (Hive/Kollective).

 

If you have a cache proxy like Ramp OmniCache, BlueCoat, Riverbed, those will work with Stream as long you as configure your network  to route video traffic through the cache servers.

 

We have a project planned to build support for Hive/Kollective and improve support for Ramp.

 

When we finish this project it will roughly work like this...

  • You purchase and deploy a SDN/eCDN solution.
  • Stream admin configures Stream with which provider (Hive/Kollective/Ramp) you are using.
  • As users play videos, Stream will automatically call provider's APIs (if needed) and load the providers player plugin, so caching can be done by solution.

I don't have a hard timeline I can promise for this but it's something we've started high level planning on.

 

Interesting - this is from the Hive website.

"The Skype Meeting Broadcast and Office 365 Video platforms allow you to use Hive Streaming for both live and on-demand video delivery"

 

But when they talk about how it works, it only mentions Broadcast.

"An unobtrusive Hive Streaming client is installed on end-user devices. The Hive client then acts as a transparent HTTP proxy between the streaming server and the Skype Meeting Broadcast player."

 

I guess I will need to follow-up with them to see why they mention Office Video and Stream when discussing optimization, since you guys have not built anything in on your end yet.

We did already add support for Hive to O365 Video, but not Stream yet. Sorry I didn't mention that, I thought you were just asking about Stream.

We or Hive can give you instructions on how to enable it for O365 Video.
Ah OK - I was asking about Stream, but the Hive website mentions both Video and Stream which led me to believe the answer would apply to both. Thanks for the clarification!
P.S. We are already a Hive customer and use it for Broadcast. We are trying to retire another VoD solution and switch to Stream but not having a P2P solution is the last blocker for us due to the number of poorly connected remote locations we have.