IP Video Reflecting

Not all networks are created equal and you need your IP Video solution to be as flexible as possible. VBrick’s Windows Media Appliance coupled with a VBrick Windows Video Reflector provides the flexibility you need to deploy IP multicast video streaming across your enterprise – here is why.

One of the biggest challenges when deploying any enterprise-wide IP video solution is the bandwidth available on the wide area network (WAN). These are usually costly low-bandwidth links that are prone to becoming network bottlenecks. These links usually don’t have IP multicast, a network protocol for efficiently delivering IP video, enabled and your service provider might be reluctant or unable to turn IP multicast on.  With some IP video solutions this would be game over, but VBrick has designed our solution to deal specifically with this problem.

We send a single unicast Windows Media stream across the WAN and deliver it to a video reflector at a remote location. The video reflector locally retransmits the stream to multiple end-users by using IP multicast on the remote locations local area network (LAN). This means that we can distribute video effectively over the wide are network without having to worry about saturating your WAN bandwidth or worrying if it is enabled for IP multicast. 

You may not have IP multicast enabled on their LAN either, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t use IP video. The same Windows Media Reflector has an embedded streaming server that can deliver up to 200 simultaneous unicast streams. Deployed properly and you can use several video reflectors to reach you audience – without having to do a major network overhaul.

Your viewers can be intelligently directed to the appropriate video reflector if used with the VEMS media management portal. If you are using our VBoss internet streaming service you can also use a reflector on your LAN to deliver that content without over utilizing your internet connection.

Delivering Windows Media® video and audio has never been easier. The VBrick Reflector technology enables a Windows Media Appliance to receive video over a low bandwidth link and retransmit it onto a local area network. This important capability allows the appliance to bridge low bandwidth bottlenecks by only delivering one video stream over the low bandwidth link, and then retransmitting video to multiple end users at the far end.

VBrick’s Reflector capability is available as a feature of our Windows Media Encoding Appliance (giving remote sites the ability to also stream video), or can be purchased as a stand-alone Reflector Appliance.