For many companies these days, video and audio presentations are a "required" element in website marketing. In this age of YouTube and other similar media websites, it can be challenging to determine which technology fits the needs of a company's end user. Do you really want to host your videos on YouTube or some other delivery network? Given the fact that many corporate networks block the like of Youtube and many other streaming media sites from their local network, this may not be an ideal solution.

Ara Surenian, the President of Cadent Resources, Inc, the creator of the DemandCaster^®, a popular Demand Planning and Inventory Optimization software, had these same questions. Together, Net Data Design developed a solution which would not only give his potential clients a better, faster video feed, but also kept bandwidth usage from getting out of control.

Steps taken to deliver a better video experience to potential and existing DemandCaster^® clients.

• Migrate the DemandCaster^® website from it Windows 2003 Server to a Windows 2008 R2 64 bit Server
• Implement the IIS Smooth Streaming Extensions
• Test encode a presentation using Microsoft's Expression Encoder 3
• Encode remaining video and deploy to the production website

While the final performance numbers will take a few months to evaluate, the bandwidth usage has dropped considerably and the site loads much more quickly. I will be adding some final data analysis to this in the next 45 days.

For more information on this technology, please check our Blog or the links to the right on this page.