How to Save $38 Million on Video Conferencing

Reach Out to Everyone

One of the banks once approached us with the task of creating a web portal for video conferencing.

Large corporations typically use Polycom or Cisco solutions for video communication. They place a camera in the manager’s office, a huge television in the conference room, then employees gather and listen to whatever a manager has to say. Installation and configuration of such a broadcasting system at one point cost from $38000. However, there is no guarantee that all employees will be present at the time of broadcasting - someone’s on the weekend, someone’s on sick leave, someone’s on vacation, and it is not possible to watch the recording of the meeting - it simply does not exist.

The goal of our customer was to reach out to each employee in each of 700 branches of the bank throughout the country. Thus, the idea of ​​creating a multi-platform broadcasting and corporate video portal was born. That would contain video recordings of management speeches, training materials for employees, meetings, webinars, and coaching.

Creating a Video Portal

The project required the installation of our Flussonic Media Server in each branch of the bank. They have branches in remote regions, where communication channels are often very poor, and the signal is delivered to each subscriber individually. In order to deliver a signal to each subscriber, you need to open a connection to the server, and this is simply not possible in a narrow Internet band. We had to make sure to create one stream per one office system. This is possible only with the installation of a node for converting the number of signals in each office, which we recommended to do.

It was also necessary to resolve the issue of licensing. The licensing model of our software involves checking the key via the Internet, so it was necessary to make it happen at all of the branches. Each one of them has the Internet, of course, but the signal is not stable everywhere. Usually, we use USB keys in such situations, but this can increase the cost of the project due to the keys creation, verification, and distribution. Therefore, we found an elegant solution: license verification through the internal server. In this case, only one USB key is needed - at the head office.

We helped to build a distributed content delivery network (CDN), where the top level is the bank’s head office, followed by regional, city and district branches. In addition, we provided a reservation: if the city node is unavailable, then the servers of the regional offices look for the signal in another source. All infrastructure broadcasting goes through our Flussonic Media Server system - at the same time, there is an additional opportunity to record, protect and download any moment of the archived video.

What We Have Now

As a result of the implementation of the project, our customer saved a huge amount of money on the installation of equipment: video conferencing systems are expensive, difficult to maintain, and require highly qualified engineers in staff. Instead of such complicated and expensive equipment, we install one desktop PC with our software, which is ten times cheaper and ten times more functional. If there is a need for maintenance or replacement of equipment, this is not particularly difficult and can be done by a system administrator at the bank office.

The bank’s internal video network is working properly and is distributed at 650 points across the country, and the management can be sure that their word will reach every employee in each branch.