News

April 20, 2008

Written by: Ira Weinstein, Wainhouse Research

Published by StreamingMedia.com

The Dow Chemical Co. is a diversified company that offers a broad range of products and services to customers in more than 175 countries, helping it to provide everything from fresh water, food, and pharmaceuticals to paints, packaging, and personal care products. Built on a commitment to principles of sustainability, Dow has annual sales of $49 billion and employs 43,000 people worldwide.

After roughly 4 years of discussions with various solution providers, in mid-2007 Dow activated the DiamondTV project, a global initiative to enable the creation, management, and delivery of rich media content to Dow locations around the world. To expand the effectiveness and reach of its existing communication programs, in mid-2007 Dow Chemical Company initiated the roll-out of a global rich media streaming solution from Starbak. To date, the company has invested roughly $1 million to deploy the streaming solution to approximately 40 locations.

Dow chose Starbak’s Integrated Network Video (INV) for a variety of reasons, including Starbak’s approach to leveraging yet protecting Dow’s IP network, the capabilities of the management engine within the platform, and the turnkey nature of the offering.

By mid-2008, the company expects DiamondTV to be available to employees in 150 locations across the globe.

Project Rationale and Objectives
Dow recognizes the importance of its global communications—both internally and externally to customers, partners, and other interested parties. For many years, the company used satellite technology to broadcast important videos and rich media content (e.g., CEO presentations) to almost 80 Dow facilities and offices in the U.S. and Europe.

Although reliable and well-received by employees, the satellite broadcast system had several limitations:

- Limited coverage area—Satellite broadcasts could reach only U.S. and European offices.
- Inconvenience—To view the content, users had to go to a particular location or room and tune into the broadcast at the scheduled time (regardless of time zone differences).
- Distribution lag—The need to reserve satellite time and inform viewers in advance of the broadcast schedule limited the ability to distribute time-sensitive information.
- Usage-based cost—Although not prohibitively expensive, satellite transmissions incur an hourly usage fee that the organization must shoulder.

In hopes of resolving these issues, Dow turned its sights on streaming, a technology that it believed would address its basic requirements while allowing it to leverage its existing infrastructure. There were five key objectives of this project:

- Reach and communicate with employees in 250-plus Dow locations around the world
- Distribute information quickly, often in a matter of hours, to a global audience
- Make information available to employees conveniently (at their desks and during local business hours) and easily
- Limit information access to individuals authorized to view that content
- Encourage the creation and distribution of rich media content

Choosing the Right Vendor/Solution
Once it understood its needs, Dow faced the challenge of finding a streaming solution that was easy to deploy and manage and that could be deployed cost-effectively throughout its global environment. Additional considerations included finding a vendor with solid experience supporting an organization as large and distributed as Dow and ensuring that Dow’s production IP network (local area network/LAN and wide area network/WAN) was not infringed.

After several years of planning and research, Dow selected Starbak and its Integrated Network Video (INV) platform. The reasons behind Dow’s choice of Starbak included the following:

- A focus on leveraging yet protecting Dow’s production IP network via support for multicast networks and the use of integrated caching appliances
- The availability of powerful centralized management platform enabling the creation, management, and protection of valuable rich media content
- The ability to integrate with existing systems in the environment (e.g., satellite distribution networks, active directory/LDAP)
- The use of standard media formats (e.g., Windows Media) that are viewable using tools already deployed throughout the environment
- A high degree of automation, which reduces the resources needed to manage and support the streaming environment
- The end-to-end coverage of the offering (supports/enables content creation, management, and distribution)
- Starbak’s experience supporting the global streaming requirements of other large multinational organizations

A Four-Pronged Approach
To address Dow’s requirements, Starbak deployed four different components:

- Starbak Manager—This is a centralized management system deployed as a turnkey appliance that provides the ability to manage the devices, content, and users within the global streaming environment. By integrating Starbak Manager with its internal directory systems (via LDAP), Dow was able to offer its users single sign-on (which eliminates the need to enter usernames and passwords to access content). In addition, Starbak Manager provides a dynamic web-based user portal that makes content available immediately after capture.
- Starbak Encoders—These appliance-based capture stations can connect directly to any video source (DVD, VCR, camera, etc.), capture analog video, and digitize the signals to Windows Media format.
- Starbak Conference Engine—This rack mounted appliance enables the addition of PC content (e.g., PowerPoint) and videoconferencing content into the streaming environment. This device allows Dow to use its existing base of videoconferencing systems as content sources.
- Starbak Delivery Nodes—These devices are installed at the edge of the network, close to where users are located, for the purpose of serving video locally, either live or on-demand, over the high-bandwidth LAN at high quality. Managed automatically by the Starbak Manager, these devices optimize content delivery and protect Dow’s production network (LAN and WAN) from the rich media traffic.

Using DiamondTV
The following steps describe how Dow uses DiamondTV:

1. Creating and broadcasting live sessions—For live sessions, Dow leverages both its existing satellite distribution network and DiamondTV. To broadcast live content, presenters go to one of Dow’s satellite uplink locations, from where the content is broadcast live to approximately 80 Dow offices. In six of those 80 locations, the live content is captured using a Starbak Encoder and distributed via Dow’s wide area network (WAN) to smaller offices and those not equipped to receive the satellite signal. The captured content is also added to the content library for on-demand viewing.
2. Creating on-demand/prerecorded sessions—For on-demand sessions, content creators (presenters) either make their presentations in locations equipped with Starbak Encoders or record the content and upload the digital content to the Starbak system. Once digitized, the content is stored on streaming file servers and then automatically distributed to select Starbak Delivery Nodes throughout the world (based on the location of the users authorized to view the content item).
3. Accessing on-demand content—To view rich media content, Dow employees visit the rich media library section (created and dynamically updated by the Starbak Manager based on the user’s credentials) on the company’s intranet. Thanks to the single sign-on feature, the user does not have to log in to the content portal in order to see the content he or she is allowed to view.

The Deployment Experience
The Starbak solution was officially launched in 3Q 2007. To date, roughly 80 programs (content items) have been created and distributed throughout Dow. As of September, approximately 30 sites had access to DiamondTV, with another 120 scheduled for activation by the end of 1Q 2008.

Although no global technology deployment is easy, Dow speaks favorably of Starbak’s performance to date. “Working with a large company, like Dow Chemical, presents unique challenges,” reports Chris Duncan, global leader, communication resources at Dow Chemical. “Throughout this project, Starbak has performed well and worked hard to address our requirements and concerns.”

Solution Benefits
The primary benefit of the Starbak-powered DiamondTV initiative has been the ability to provide Dow’s global user community with convenient access to the information they need to do their jobs, regardless of their locations or time zones. Other benefits include the following:

- Increased reach—Dow estimates that the typical content item will be viewed by 20% more people without an increase in cost. In addition, the system makes rich media content available to employees in smaller offices (and even home offices).
- Simplified content creation—The automation of the content creation process has allowed Dow to create more content more easily than ever before.
- Improved security—User-based permissioning within the system allows Dow to limit content access on an individual content-item basis to only authorized personnel.
- Decreased cost—Dow estimates a savings of 25% per content session/program through the use of streaming to distribute content throughout the global environment.
- Ability to segment audience—DiamondTV allows content creators to define who should view each content item, allowing them to created customized messages for target audiences.
- Increased accountability and tracking—The system’s logging and reporting systems allow Dow to track viewing by content item, user, department, topic, and so on. This helps Dow measure the value and effectiveness of its content to a greater degree.
- Increased scalability—The system’s modular architecture allows Dow to expand the content creation, storage, and delivery capacity at any time without having to overhaul the entire environment.

Best Practices/Lessons Learned
Although the DiamondTV project is proceeding well to date, the team has learned a few lessons along the way.

IT Involvement
Dow was wise to include representatives from its IT and networking departments in the streaming project from day one. Having these resources involved early had the following benefits:

- Helped streamline the decision-making process throughout the project
- Paved the way for integration with internal systems and services (e.g., LDAP)
- Ensured that the deployment did not infringe upon the production IP network

Capacity Planning
The rollout of DiamondTV has spurred increased interest in content creation and distribution throughout the organization. In hindsight, perhaps this should have been anticipated. For now, however, Dow is dealing with this surge in demand in two ways:

- Limiting content creation to high-quality, polished content on approved topics likely to be of interest to large audiences within the firm
- Expediting plans for expanding the content storage capacity within the system

Gradual Deployment and Migration
To minimize the impact on the user community, Dow is deploying DiamondTV gradually. In addition, instead of implementing a sudden change-over from the existing satellite system, Dow is using a hybrid approach including elements of the satellite system and the new streaming system. By avoiding the temptation to rush the deployment and change-over, Dow has been able to add new functionality to the environment without impacting the level of service.

Future Plans
In addition to the planned deployments and natural expansion of the content library, Dow expects to add new features and functionality to the DiamondTV system. Items currently under consideration include the following:

- Expansion of the content storage capacity within the environment
- Extension of content viewing privileges to external audiences (partners and the public)
- Use of digital signage throughout Dow (powered by Starbak’s Display Engine)

Furthermore, in 2008 Dow expects to upgrade its current Starbak INV system to the new Starbak V3—the third-generation solution from Starbak designed to support greater scalability and improved ease of use.