Every smartphone that ships today has a video recorder. More than three billion YouTube videos are viewed across the world every day. Fifty percent of all Internet traffic is video, according to Cisco, and companies are starting to get on the bandwagon too - some 50% of Fortune 100 firms have YouTube channels. Yet the typical business network in SA just isn't geared to cope with video traffic effectively and that's a problem: video usage is only growing. One user who has to cope with a lot of video on his network is manager of networks and telecommunications at the SABC, Greg Mallett.
"As a broadcaster, we have a lot of video, obviously," he says. "We have video contributions from our provincial offices on the WAN. And internally, there's a lot of video at Auckland Park moving around and being edited, plus the usual suspects like video-conferencing. But we're a media company so most of it is focused on broadcast video and that is growing."
Lilia Marques, senior manager of infrastructure at Deloitte, says video is growing in her organisation because of training.
"In our marketing division, we have a lot of video content that's business-related, including e-learning. And we're moving away from the traditional classroom-type training and more to video. We get a lot of demand from the user base to move to video."
Rabelani Dagada, head of the eLearning support and innovation department at Wits University, is also seeing a large uptake of video for educational reasons.
"As part of e-learning at Wits, we're trying to capture some lectures and make them available through podcasts," he says. "The intent is to help with certain subjects such as Economics 1, where there are 500 students per class. The problem is that some of the students lose a lot during the interaction and we don't want to disadvantage them. So we're making the material available in a Web environment. Eventually, we want to have real-time lectures but that will eat up a lot of our bandwidth."
Hugo Winterbach, director at Extraordinary Minds, says video training is also used at the remote mine where he's been working.
"I've seen video training in a remote mine environment. It is high-impact health and safety videos that show how accidents happen. They are very graphic in order to drive the message home. Those videos are on the network and used in classroom training."
Winterbach's colleague, Carl Scholz, has been spending a lot of time in the retail environment.
"There, companies are using video a lot at checkout as well as in the more corporate setting for internal briefings and to introduce new projects."
Whatever bandwidth you have, people will use.
Greg Mallett, SABC
Tertia Labuschagne, business development manager for network integration at Dimension Data, says the only thing her company does differently to most companies as regards video is security.
"Our camera feeds run across the network. But across the WAN, all of our case studies, internal marketing and product demonstrations are done on video and that is shared. This is a natural way to learn: when I need to learn how to do something, I don't go and download an e-mail but rather go to YouTube and watch a video."
Feed management
How can companies manage this deluge of video without spending inordinate amounts of money on new infrastructure? The SABC's Mallett says if video is managed properly, then it doesn't kill the network.
"We have a fairly restrictive WAN because of cost and we can't afford upgrading. We track Internet users and manage it. Of course there comes a point when you can't manage any more and have to upgrade. Our video format is tricky to move around in big chunks and we can't keep re-encoding it. But it's more video-conferencing, Skype and Office Communicator that are growing."
Deloitte's Marques says the trend is going to get worse.
"Like we did with voice when it came along, it required a particular quality of service and that exercise is going to have to be done with video as well. Everyone has experienced what happens to your network when you put too much video across it."
So what's to be done? Dave Ewart, head of product marketing for EMEA at Blue Coat, says there are techniques to deal with video, ways of dealing with broadcast quality video and different ones to deal with live streaming.
"On an MPLS network, you can prioritise video traffic so that if a video-conference is an important corporate function, you can give it the bandwidth it needs. Having awareness of the different applications is important to managing the network. There is always stuff that isn't quite as time-critical."
Labuschagne says understanding what is there must come first.
"What you have to do first, before you start managing, is understand what is happening. Once you've established what's going through the network - what users are using what kinds of services - and once you've found out the different types of video and applications that are being used, then you can put in an appropriate solution."
Having the content close to the user is king.
Justin Lee, Blue Coat
Scholtz says video across networks seems wonderful, but other than really basic usage, it's not really used as extensively as it could be because of our bandwidth restrictions.
"Maybe one day we'll have so much bandwidth that there will be no need for quality of service. The fact that we don't have enough bandwidth means we're not using video for the fancier applications."
Labuschagne says there will always be a need for some QoS.
"There was once a Telkom ad that showed a doctor in South Africa and a patient in Russia and that solution used ISDN lines. That proves that you don't necessarily need a lot of bandwidth but you do need optimised bandwidth. The reality is that optimisation of how we use bandwidth will always be required for quality of service. More bandwidth might allow us to use higher-quality video or live services such as TelePresence."
Killer app
Mallett agrees.
"It doesn't matter how much bandwidth you have, people are going to use what you have and you still have to manage the quality of service."
Neil Simonsen, business development manager at Dimension Data, agrees with Scholtz that video could go way beyond just the basics.
"There is a question, for which I don't have an answer, but is video the killer app or will the killer app emerge when there is some new way of using video that we haven't got our heads around yet? There could be killer applications that are enabled by video. I was reading an interesting article recently about a company in the US that makes digital video cameras with video resolution of 4 000 x 4 000. Imagine that sort of feed."
Justin Lee, country manager of Blue Coat SA, says QoS is fundamental.
"When you're looking at running video across a network, QoS is vital but you do need to take a step back and find out just what you are running on your network. You might not have just video but applications that use video. So it's about identifying the correct video streams that you want to prioritise. You can pick up video streams and different protocols but you do need application intelligence at the network level to see if YouTube is taking up 80% of the bandwidth, for example. Is that mission-critical? It might be if you're a marketing company. Do companies sit down and define which applications are important and which aren't? I think that's a good starting point."
Blue Coat's Ewart says a good way to start optimising is to start at the source.
"If you find there is redundant information in a file or an application transaction, you can start with that. On the video side, there are smart guys working on video compression. The thing you can't do with video is compress it more and apply traditional WAN optimisation thinking but you can be smart about it. Some people find it surprising that you can optimise video and streaming just by understanding the delivery mechanisms. One of the things we do is use multicasting instead of running multiple streams. We also shift content around so that it's closer to the user. One of our big customers provides live streaming services to traders around the world and they don't want pixelated charts on their desktops. We've managed to deliver highly optimised content to them using things like caching and optimised networking. It's almost a cable TV model where the content and the shifting of content can happen efficiently."
Next generation
Awareness of different applications is critical.
Dave Ewart, Blue Coat
If the current glut of video isn't enough, there are even hungrier formats in store. Labuschagne says some vendors and telcos are starting to talk about 3D video-conferencing using holograms.
"That's exciting. But it means we need to get our minds around what it means for our networks so that we can be ready for it. It's not limited to a LAN or WAN or wireless. If video-conferencing is going to be universal, then it has to work anywhere."
Lee asks how much bandwidth will be enough bandwidth.
"I don't think we will ever get to the point where the bandwidth will be too much for us. There are technologies used by the rest of the world, such as Hulu and Netflix, we would all love to get our hands on. The other problem is the classic e-mail attachment problem is changing. Before you would send a video clip to 10 of your friends. But smart filters have stopped that. So you just send a link: here's the YouTube video, go watch it. In a way, we've reversed the problem. Is this content coming into our infrastructure business-critical? Does it need to be optimised? Does it need to be accelerated or cached? Having the content close to the user is king."
And there's the generational problem, as Marques points out.
"New employees coming in demand access to video and we're asking for better ways of managing bandwidth without being restrictive. But to do that you first need to know what you have. Once you know that, then there are a hundred techniques to manage it."
But, as the French note, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Hement Gopal is senior engineer for information security at Wits and his responsibility is the network.
"I manage traffic at the university and we have to keep everything open. When I started working here, looking after the Internet connection, we had a link of a couple of megabits per second. We now have a 1Gbps link, but I have the same problem that I had 14 years ago, just at a different scale. The perception is - we have a megabit link, so why is everything so slow?"
First published in the February 2012 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.
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