How to Improve Stream Quality with Hive Streaming

If you’re wondering how to improve streaming video quality for your business, it’s time to check out Hive streaming. Hive streaming is a technology designed for scalability and ease of use when sending live and linear video over the internet and private networks.

Onstream Media’s EncompassPro for live streaming events makes use of Hive technology to provide our customers the best and most professionally optimized streaming video service available today. Here’s how Hive can help you improve stream quality and provide the professional solution necessary to attract your target audience with high-resolution video events.

What is Hive Streaming?

A hive streaming service provides customers with the technology to optimize streaming video. It’s a web-based solution that helps video conferencing providers like Onstream Media provide a higher quality live and on-demand video feed.

Behind the scenes, Hive streaming is an algorithm built on top of the WebRTC platform. The tool sits in the cloud between the end user’s device and the video signal they’re receiving. It’s a smart tool that autonomously selects the optimal way to deliver the right content at the right time to make a better and more optimized video experience.

 How Does Hive Streaming Work to Optimize Your Video Quality?

There’s an inherent challenge with delivering HTTP-based live streams; to put it simply, the pipe can clog as more users join in the experience. One common solution to the bottleneck at the source of the stream is typically to introduce a caching feature through content distribution networks (CDNs) that help improve latency and throughput. However, the CDN solution only works if there are enough nodes available near the viewers to support the video stream. To make a long network distribution story shorter, this causes performance issues in the CDN. The end viewer experiences dropped stream, latency, and other hiccups that cause an interrupted video stream.  

Needless to say, your customers won’t blame the CDN or a lack of nodes for a less than optimized streaming video experience. Having a de-optimized streaming video experience reflects poorly on your brand, no matter the actual cause.

The best way to improve streaming video quality is through Hive streaming. Hive offers a software-based CDN that intelligently distributes across the cloud to deliver more efficient video streams. The Hive streaming tech site describes the solution in this way, “Hive.js creates a distributed CDN infrastructure where each viewer’s browser acts both as a consumer and a server of video content without the need of installing browser plugins or third-party software.”

Hive streaming automatically and seamlessly utilizes any idle network capacity to improve the video streaming experience for end-users. It does this by taking existing devices and forming a VDN or video distribution network. One tech brief describes this process in this way, “The Hive Clients jointly and autonomously select the optimal way to fetch the right content at the right time and automatically distributes it amongst themselves.”

However, this new approach to improve streaming video quality is only possible through the use of WebRTC. What is WebRTC and how does it work with Hive?

WebRTC and Hive Streaming for Higher Streaming Video Quality

WebRTC is an open-source internet-based platform designed to add real-time communication capabilities to any digital application. WebRTC enables video and audio communication to work within a web page with no plugins needed to work within the browser.

WebRTC technology enables voice, video, and other data to flow smoothly between peers and it’s available on all major browsers. Video conferencing solutions like Onstream Media build the algorithms from WebRTC technology into their software solution so that customers experience a seamless stream without the hassle of downloading proprietary software onto their digital devices.

WebRTC is supported by most major browsers, including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Microsoft Edge.

Hive streaming algorithms embed directly into the video players within WebRTC networks to reduce network bandwidth congestion. This greatly improves the delivery of the WebRTC solution, which is exactly why these two technologies can improve the stream quality of your next virtual live event.

The benefits of Hive WebRTC go beyond improved stream quality. Because WebRTC is a browser-based video conferencing solution, there’s no software to install on individual end user devices. Pushing software from the internet to a video conferencing or streaming customer creates the friction of an additional download before participating in an event. There are also risks associated with downloading any software from the internet. Hive WebRTC avoids all of these issues for a better end-user experience.

To recap, Hive-enabled WebRTC video conferencing offers several benefits for both you and your customers:

• Easy access to video streaming content without downloading any software from the internet. Simply hit a browser link for a seamless streaming experience.
• Higher quality, low-latency, effective streaming solutions to improve the video conferencing experience and build your brand.

The result is a highly efficient and adaptive web-based system that is reliable, clean, and provides an outstanding customer experience.

Where can you find Hive and WebRTC video conferencing solutions to improve your stream quality? Onstream Media’s EncompassPro Hive streaming service has been here waiting for your business to take advantage of the best video solution on the market today.

How Can EncompassPro Improve Stream Quality for Your Next Live Event?

If you’re wondering how to optimize streaming video for your internal and external clients, look no further than Onstream Media’s EncompassPro virtual events platform. This technology incorporates the best technical resources in the industry, on a Hive-enabled browser-based WebRTC architecture that is literally second to none in the industry.

It’s cutting-edge and extremely intelligent and reliable software that provides our clients with the highest quality live stream for virtual trade shows, webinars, product rollouts, sales presentations, and so much more. All of these events can be fully branded for your business. These tools can also integrate with communication tools such as live chats, downloadable content, customer databases, calendaring, and so much more.

Businesses of all sizes use the Onstream Media EncompassPro product to optimize streaming video. What are you waiting for? Call us to find out more.