Deep Dive into P2P Delivery with StreamShark and Hive Streaming

UPDATE: StreamShark now offers Hive WebRTC which requires no hardware or software to be installed.

StreamShark is an end-to-end live streaming platform for reliable delivery of live video to websites, intranets and social destinations. From All Hands, AGMs, product announcements and everything in between StreamShark is trusted with streaming the live events of some of the largest, high profile companies and billion dollar brands in the world. They depend on StreamShark’s expertise in reliable delivery of live and on-demand video content, and leverage StreamShark to give their audiences an exceptional viewing experience across all major platforms and devices.

StreamShark is architected with unparalleled reliability and elegantly scales to deliver large scale live streams of internal or public events. Our unique operator friendly workflows solve the common pain points around live and on-demand streaming for enterprises. StreamShark supports the complete workflow: live stream setup, testing with desired security measures (Digital Rights Management, Access Control, Single Sign On), transcoding for adaptive bitrate streaming, global multi-CDN delivery, effectively interacting with viewers, creating live highlights and trimming archives.

Furthermore, our enterprise customers who opt to use peer based delivery enjoy the Hive for StreamShark integration, which leverages Hive Streaming to deliver an exceptional Quality of Experience (QoE) for viewers while reducing load on the corporate network and achieving significant bandwidth savings.

Benefits of Hive P2P

We chose to partner with Hive Streaming and deeply integrate StreamShark with Hive. We highly recommend using StreamShark with our Hive integration, delivering the following benefits to enterprises:

• Lowers load on server and networks
• Enables all viewers to consume high quality streams, regardless of weak network links and remote offices
• Scales to tens of thousands of viewers
• Utilizes existing idling infrastructure and turns viewer’s computers and networks resources into distributions nodes, without requiring additional hardware investment.
• Near to zero configuration clients – proxies, firewalls and NATs are automatically detected and handled
• Runs on Windows, Mac OSX, Linux
  • Enables performing silent testing in advance of key live events
  • Verifying entire video streaming workflow
  • Identifying problems before mission-critical events
  • Guaranteeing quality streaming video for all viewers
  • Visualizing the network from a global view down to an individual user’s view
• Access to in-depth metrics and reports on Quality of Experience (QoE)

We can offer and implement other forms of P2P which have some of the above listed benefits, but lack certain enterprise features such as silent testing and in-depth Quality of Experience (QoE) reporting.

How Hive Integrates

Hive is deeply integrated into StreamShark’s Event platform and applies to live events including DVR (catch-up while live), instant archives of live events as well as videos offered on-demand. StreamShark has native support for all Hive modes of P2P acceleration – HiveJava (desktop client), HiveU (browser-based Javascript plugin) and StatsJS (stats only Javascript plugin).

For Desktop Clients, initially a Hive Client Self-Test is performed to determine the installation process and confirm the appropriate installers that the IT-department requires to deploy the system. Following the Hive client deployment, a deployment verification test is performed.

How It Works

The integration is completely automated and performs seamlessly without any manual configuration.

Ease of Use with 1-click Process

StreamShark’s Enterprise users include some of the best video teams in the world. While these teams have deep technical expertise, they seek efficient, practical and reliable workflows that they can count on. StreamShark has made it very easy for their users to leverage Hive in 1-click as described below.

Within StreamShark, Add an Event with the P2P option set to ON. With this option enabled, the Hive API creates matching events (called ‘tickets’) on the Hive system, updates these as needed and keeps StreamShark and Hive metadata in sync at all times.

Hive provides detailed QoE insights for StreamShark Events for review by users. This straightforward automated workflow has been key in our joint customers effectively adopting and maximizing use of StreamShark and Hive for all confidential and restricted events across their enterprise.

Exceptional Viewer Experience

The figure on the right depicts the delivery of StreamShark live streams to Standard Viewers vs. Viewers with Hive.The contribution feed is pushed to an Event created in StreamShark. Upon going live, the feed is shown on StreamShark’s video player with the live feed delivered via StreamShark multi-CDN to viewers. Viewers that don’t have the Hive client or browser plugin available, download the video segments directly from StreamShark CDN servers.

However, if the Hive client or browser plugin is installed, Viewers can effectively use their devices as distribution nodes. StreamShark sees efficiency gains of up to 80% – 90% (i.e. percentage of traffic delivered over P2P vs. the CDN/Internet) with enterprise customers that have elected to enable this feature. Regardless of the device type or browser, StreamShark gracefully falls back to deliver the best possible experience and insights for viewers, from desktop to mobile. The StreamShark video player reports the Hive Insights back into the platform for users to review key QoE metrics.

Live Stream Quality of Experience (QoE) metrics Report

Here is an example report on the Quality of Experience (QoE) metrics provided by Hive for a live stream. It is also possible to delve deeper into the insights to understand quality of experience for an individual or sub-net.

For further information on StreamShark, please contact me or reach out directly to StreamShark at [email protected].