December 21, 1999 Web posted at: 10:16 a.m. EST (1516 GMT) by Bonny Georgia

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(IDG) -- Streaming media, which has long been a popular feature of consumer-oriented Web sites, is now gaining popularity in corporate networks as an effective communications tool and an important way to save money.

Everything that makes streaming audio and video a powerful communications medium on the Web makes it a natural fit for the enterprise. Compared with static photos or plain text, streaming media has more impact on the end user, increasing the overall effectiveness of the message.

Broadcasting streaming media live to employee desktops is a great way to deliver timely messages. And making media streams available on demand means users can access information no matter where they are or what time zone they're in.

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Anyone with a reasonably current PC equipped with video and sound cards, a browser and a playback utility can access the corporate intranet and view late-breaking news announcements, attend CEO briefings, participate in long-distance training seminars, or review other mission-critical information that would normally require travel or attendance at a large, location-specific meeting.

Outside an organization, streaming media is perfect for informing key partners, customers and the media of new product launches, holding sales force training events, conducting virtual trade shows and enhancing customer service.

Corporate customers are discovering that streaming media can result in huge reductions in marketing, training and traditional communications costs.

For example, Hewlett-Packard recently invested $60,000 to implement streaming media based on Microsoft's Windows Media Technologies and Webcasting services from Network24 Communications. The goal was to reduce the need for multicity marketing road shows, audio conferences and video conferences related to product launches. The company reported savings of $1.2 million in the first year alone.

Although concrete numbers on the current installed base or growth projections of streaming media in the enterprise are hard to come by, anecdotal evidence clearly shows Fortune 1000 firms, especially those with an existing competency or corporate culture built around video, are shifting to it for in-house use at a rapid rate.

Eric in the morning

Novell was introduced to the power of streaming media about two years ago and has been expanding its use ever since. "The Web group wanted to do a video broadcast of a product launch, so we got the Real-Networks tools, developed a streaming media event around it, and it went well," says Benjamin Brimhall, business media analyst at Novell.

The next major event to be Webcast was Novell CEO Eric Schmidt's address at Comdex. "We realized that beyond the 9,000 people at Comdex watching this thing live, we were able to extend this content to a significantly larger audience for very little cost. So we started to try it with more things," Brimhall says.

Today, Novell holds a number of streaming media events on a regular basis. For example, Schmidt records "radio shows" for employees once a month, and on a quarterly basis he comments on the company's financials. "These are delivered to everyone's desktops in the morning. They come in and see a new Eric Schmidt radio show is available, and they can listen to it and get a feel for what's happening around the company," Brimhall says.

Outside of the company, Novell uses streaming media for marketing, sales training, technical training, developer training, product information and to extend the reach of corporate events at trade shows. The company has also experimented with pay-per-view conference events. Brimhall estimates that Novell averages nearly 35,000 external viewers of streaming marketing material, sales training material and other documents per month.

Novell uses Real Producer Plus to encode live and on-demand content. One Sun Enterprise 3000 server manages all of Novell's external video, while two Real-Networks video streaming servers behind the firewall take care of internal broadcasts that are received by employees as far away as Germany and England.

To avoid bandwidth bottlenecks, Novell uses IP Multicast technology for internal broadcasting and delivers content at multiple bit rates. "We always do a 28K modem feed, a 56K modem feed, an ISDN feed of around 80K per second and a much higher-bandwidth version for a corporate LAN, around 200K per second,'' Brimhall says.

He adds: "When we did the first BrainShare conference, we actually overran our main Cisco switches because we had too much traffic. That was a good thing. It showed us what demand was and made us rethink our architecture for delivering streaming media. We reconfigured our switch and haven't had a problem since."

Brimhall estimates that Novell spent about $250,000 to implement streaming technology in terms of hardware, software and video production equipment, but the savings realized have been impressive. The company is saving $450,000 per year formerly spent producing and mailing technical videos to key partners and channel members.

And "for internal communications we figure we've saved anywhere between $500,000 and $1 million in travel and people time annually by delivering broadcast to the desktop rather than collecting people into meetings," he says.

Implementing streaming media at Novell has been so successful that the company plans to build a new studio to expand its capacity for creating content.

Brimhall advises other companies not to fear the transition to streaming media. "I understand a lot of network managers are concerned about the bandwidth that may be sucked up by this,'' he says. But Brimhall adds that even if going to streaming media requires a significant bandwidth upgrade, the savings will more than offset the cost.