Increasingly and for a variety of reasons, companies are producing videos focused on customers, employees, and marketing. Managing and delivering these videos can be problematic because they are often stored in the cloud, and if too many people start streaming them at once, it can bring the network down to modem-like performance levels.
A relatively new company, Vbrick, has stepped into this breach. Vbrick specializes in creating a kind of internal Netflix to help manage and painlessly deliver these videos to end users be they inside or outside the company. Vbrick has been a hit inside large enterprises like Boeing, Ford, FedEx, Disney, and Morgan Stanley.
It has become so powerful and popular that sales have doubled year-over-year and the company reports near 100% retention, which speaks to how well the solution works at scale. Enterprises typically don’t work with smaller companies like this unless the solution is unique and strategic. Vbrick appears to be both.
Netflix for Companies
Videos, particularly now that a lot of our folks are working remotely, are a key way that employes and customers learn about the company, its products, services, operations, and how to complete related tasks. But creating high quality videos and then providing them in an easy-to-discover fashion without cratering the network is problematic.
What is needed is a Netflix-like internal service that catalogs these videos and then, like Netflix, deals with transport in a way that doesn’t cripple the network. Vbrick provides all that by creating an online library of the firm’s videos, secures them so that those who aren’t approved to see them can’t get access to them, and then caches the videos locally so that resolution can be maintained and latency reduced. Where bandwidth is an issue, the service will down-sample the video stream just like Netflix does to ensure latency and high framerates while preserving network performance for everything else.
The service is like Box only focused on videos in that it is designed to integrate with existing policies and traffic management applications so that it won’t disrupt operations while giving the users a Netflix-level experience with internal videos.
As a result, security is extremely high with both tunneling and encryption technology to prevent the videos from being compromised when streamed or when at rest. While this isn’t a collaboration solution, it can accept videos from applications like Zoom and Teams so that, if you need to preserve and rebroadcast or simply manage videos from past meetings, the solution can help you do that.
This is also one of the true hybrid solutions using a balance of cloud and on-premises resources to keep video storage costs down while assuring low latency and dynamically moving the videos as usage demands while preserving the user experience. In some ways this is even more advanced than what Netflix does.
While Vbrick doesn’t upscale the videos at the client, it will work with client-side video display applications that use upscaling technologies from companies like AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA when the company needs to preserve or increase resolution, even when bandwidth results in the application lowering it. I expect future versions of Vbrick’s own application will do this once the use of discrete GPUs (needed for upscaling) become more common or integrated GPUs get this functionality (which is also coming).
Wrapping Up:
Video has increasingly been critical to the enterprise, and with the current work-from-home trend, it has never been more critical. Vbrick provides a unique solution to video creation and management, making it a critical tool for some of the largest enterprises in the world and worth a look if you have a video management problem and need a ready solution that can bring a Netflix-like experience to your internal and external users.
