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The CEO wanted everyone in the company to view a 5 minute video. I signed up for a corporate account with Vimeo and hosted the video there. We sent out a global email with the link at 9:30 this morning. By 9:45, we received a dozen complaints of stuttering video, slow loads and failed loads. Vimeo performed fine, but everyone going through the corporate proxy had a problem. We have a 50Mb pipe from the ISP and 1200 employees at the corporate office plus 500 more worldwide.

How would you have handled this differently given our infrastructure?

I'm looking for practical answers, not just technical solutions. In the future, should we announce to small groups at different times? Host the video internally for the corporate office? Open to all suggestions.

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    Host it internally. Think about multicast.
    – mailq
    Oct 24, 2011 at 17:56
  • Multicast would work if we were broadcasting to all simultaneously. We informed all simultaneously so they could watch at their convenience. Oct 24, 2011 at 21:39
  • Multicast it every 2nd hour.
    – mailq
    Oct 24, 2011 at 21:44

2 Answers 2

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Assuming you have a 50MB symmetrical link with your ISP, if you host the video internally you'll save the Internet traffic for your internal 1200 users (download), while having to send it out to the 500 worldwide users (upload). That's a net balance of 700 * (video size) less traffic, so hosting it internally is definitely something you should look into.

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  • That does seem to be the answer... Since asking this question, I have come across some video hosts that even offer to create a copy for local distribution. (Vimeo does not offer this to the best of my knowledge.) Nov 2, 2011 at 21:35
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but everyone going through the corporate proxy had a problem

Check your proxy settings. Checkt the max. size of files that are getting cached by your proxy. If the file is getting served by the proxy for the internal users and the rest by the content provider you should be fine. For internal hosting on your own "video server" mailq´s comment is worth thinking about it.

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