StreamAware: Stream away with StreamAware

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About StreamAware

Hi, my name is Nicole McLane, and I'm the CEO of StreamAware. Over the years, I have gained a lot of experience doing webcasts of all shapes and sizes, both as the principal of my own streaming consultancy company, On-Demand Incorporated, and as VP of the Broadcast and Streaming Media Development Group at JPMorganChase.

During this time I've seen the use of webcasting grow at a ferocious pace - especially in the enterprise space - yet at the same time the dynamic nature of routing streams across multiple data centers on the World Wide Web makes live streaming more of a challenge today than ever, especially when done from remote locations.

The result of a live stream not taking the optimal route from the point of production - where you're webcasting from - to the point of distribution - your CDN of choice or internal eCDN - is a greatly increased chance that your users won't be able to view an interrupted live streaming. That then means all the work put into producing a webcast is wasted.

To be able to successfully navigate the sometimes stormy seas of the Internet, I needed a tool that could enable me as a webcast producer to quickly forecast the Streaming Weather of a particular location prior to an event while also providing me instant feedback on a live webcast without disconnecting the stream. So I set out and searched for a tool that would tell me:

  • What's my available bandwidth? (Taking into consideration the additional TCP bandwidth consumption required for the Media Servers to communicate with the encoder and vice versa)
  • Can I stream video or should I stick with audio-only?
  • Does the Media Server have the correct ports for the codec(s) I'm using?
  • Which CDN has the best connectivity at that time from that location?

I looked for a product that could do all of this quickly, without a lot of setup, and without a network engineer's presence required. When I couldn't find anything that fit my needs, I sketched out a basic working prototype for personal use.

Then it occurred to me that other producers must encounter the same problems I have, so I decided to build my concept out into a product that everyone could use. That product is StreamAware, which I'm proud to announce has recently come out of beta and is available for sale to the public.

I firmly believe that anyone charged with producing a webcast, especially one encoded in multiple formats, can benefit from the use of StreamAware in order to gain an added level of confidence in their ability to successfully stream a live event from a specific location at a particular point in time.

Thank you very much for taking the time to visit our site and learn more about how StreamAware can help improve your webcasting experience. I look forward to working with many of you as we all push forward together to encourage the further adoption of webcasting as not only an effective means of communication, but also a reliable one.

Sincerely

Nicole “Nico” McLane