Blue Coat Splits Flash Video Streams

Blue Coat Systems today moved to address that issue by adding a Optimized Video Delivery capability that can stream-split live Adobe Flash video.

According to Mark Urban, Blue Coat senior director of product marketing, this capability allows multiple users on the network to see the same stream of Flash video without having to send a copy of the streaming video to each individual user.  It  relies on Blue Coat’s unique approach to caching video on its application acceleration appliances.

According to Urban, video can consume 30 to 60 percent of the bandwidth on a wide area network. By deploying Blue Coat appliances, Urban says that IT organizations in effect can create their own content-delivery network that uses policies to give priority to certain streams of video traffic, such as a broadcast from the CEO, versus the popular content on YouTube.

Blue Coat stream-splitting includes support for both the Adobe Flash Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) and Microsoft Windows Media MMS- and RTSP-based streaming media.