VITEC’s Newest Version of EZ TV with Multicast-to-theEdge® Improves CDC’s Video Streaming Capabilities
When it comes mitigating major threats to public health, it is imperative for organizations like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to keep their finger on the pulse of global developments that require a coordinated national or global response. “In addition to being ardent consumers of news and information, doctors, scientists, and other healthcare experts at the CDC produce a tremendous amount of original content for both internal and external consumption. This makes the agency one of the most video-centric departments in the federal government,” says Dan Quinn, Federal Sales Director at VITEC, a worldwide leader in advanced video encoding and streaming solutions for business, industrial and public sector applications.
The Challenge
Reliance on video traffic was compounded over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, as CDC staff were sent to work from home where they collectively participated in exponentially more video meetings. This shift to working remotely resulted in a tremendous explosion of video traffic that put unprecedented stress on the CDC’s enterprise networks. VITEC’s challenge for many enterprise customers, in corporate and public sectors, moving to remote work for most operations was the fact that major browser providers ceased support for tools that enabled network-efficient video multicasting. The work-around has historically been use of browser plugins to effectively stream video content to multiple destinations, but that is no longer an option. Everything changed when Google, Apple and Microsoft took browser-based tools off the market in the wake of security, stability, and performance concerns.
The Solution Addressing Network Costs and Performance EZ TV Platform’s Multicast-to-the-Edge® HTML5 IPTV Player had a positive impact on network costs and performance at the CDC. Browser vendor policies regarding application extension support meant VITEC had already developed a solution that improved streaming video quality that benefits the CDC. VITEC’s EZ TV Player Lite addressed plugin challenges that had arisen for other customers, and it provides continued support of the CDC’s mission critical video streaming. VITEC’s patented Multicast-to-the-Edge® (MttE) technology was deployed across the agency. This upgrade is timely, in that the feature now exists, to alleviate the same concern for all business enterprises and Federal agencies faced with similar requirements for a plugin-less live multicast video player. This technology has been integrated into the latest version of VITEC’s video streaming solution, allowing corporate and enterprise users, with substantial video traffic, to deliver live multicast video streams to any browser without the need for browser plugins or extensions on both Windows OS and Mac OS computers. EZ TV Player Lite has been deployed across the CDC, delivering extremely fast and efficient video streaming technology over the existing enterprise network.
