That is the decline in the number of companies who provide a hardwired solution for employees to connect to the company network, and an increase of a Wi-Fi only Internet connectivity model. Video delivery vendors must consider a recent enterprise trend, one that further complicates the challenge of delivering streaming video without overwhelming and bringing down a company’s local network. Wi-Fi Supplants Ethernet Making Multicast More Necessary than Ever Other video delivery vendors have reacted to the news of Silverlight’s EOL with fundamentally different technical approaches than multicast: unicast and peer-to-peer. With the end of Microsoft Silverlight, Multicast+ represents the next phase in the evolution of multicast.
There is a widespread demand and an urgent need for a multicast video streaming solution that is compatible across all browsers, devices, and platforms. Multicast+ delivers standards-based and secure multicast support to any live video deployment that uses HTTP Live Streaming (HLS). We developed our own multicast solution so we can enable companies to continue to deliver high-quality streaming video to large groups of employees globally. Ramp launched the Ramp Multicast Engine (RME) in May 2015 at Microsoft Ignite in Chicago, and have since rebranded it AltitudeCDN Multicast+. With both technologies now officially end-of-life by Microsoft, there is a huge opportunity for any vendor who can provide a replacement.
Windows Media multicast and Silverlight multicast playback has been the staple for large-scale video delivery in the enterprise. As you can imagine, hundreds, or thousands, of users viewing a live stream can overwhelm networks, introducing major obstacles in smoothly delivering a streaming event. Take for example a quarterly CEO Town Hall in which the CEO seeks to address the entire organization in real-time. This is critical for large organizations. They provide the ability to reliably stream high quality video across the global enterprise with minimal impact on a company’s network. Windows Media multicast and Silverlight multicast playback have been the standards for large-scale video delivery in the enterprise for good reason.
This is confirmed on Microsoft’s Support Lifecycle page: “Silverlight 5 will support the browser versions listed on this page through, or though the support lifecycle of the underlying browsers, whichever is shorter.” Microsoft has announced Windows Media Server and Microsoft Silverlight are nearing end-of-life. But soon, the de facto standards for multicast video streaming will be no more. Large enterprises have been using a ‘multicast’ approach to stream live video across the organization and world for more than a decade.