Network options are limited when it comes to improving the performance of real-time media delivery over a network. You can provide plenty of bandwidth and tune codecs for the bandwidth available. But media streams could still be choppy or there can even be disconnections.
There are now new products that can optimize transmissions. Expand Networks and Silver Peak Systems have a device to optimize UDP, for example. When several users will be viewing the same media at the same time, their stream-splitting capabilities request one stream from the source and then delivers it to multiple users on the LAN, much like multi-cast, but without multi-casting’s implementation and support issues. The result is one stream for many users and less WAN utilization. Visit http://apmreport.informationweek.com/ to download a report with more information.
