VBrick WM Windows Media Webcast Video Streaming Reflector

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 enabled (a network protocol for efficiently delivering IP video) 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.

The VBrick Windows Media Reflector receives a webcast video over a low bandwidth link and retransmits it onto a local area network. This capability overcomes the streaming over low bandwidth bottlenecks by only delivering one video stream over the low bandwidth link, and then retransmitting the video to multiple end users at the far end.

User can send a single unicast Windows Media stream from event venue across the WAN and deliver it to a VBrick Windows Media Reflector at a remote location. The VBrick Windows Media 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 area network without having to worry about saturating your WAN bandwidth or worrying if it is enabled for IP multicast.

For organizations without IP multicast enabled on their LAN either, this does not mean that IP video streaming is not possible within the organization. The VBrick Windows Media Reflector has an embedded streaming server that can deliver up to 200 simultaneous unicast streams. Organizations can use several VBrick Windows Media Reflectors to reach all audience at the headquarters and branches, 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.

VBrick Windows Media Reflector can be purchased as a stand-alone Reflector Appliance. It is also available as a feature of the VBrick Windows Media Encoder.