Kathea, a local distributor of visual communications and unified communication (UC) solutions, has partnered with London-based Disruptive Vision to bring the innovative Zoom video streaming solution to the local market.
Zoom is a standards-based, software only, virtualised video broadcasting and streaming platform built for enormous scale. It offers live broadcast with rich interaction, video on-demand and streaming to open area screen displays.
Says Peter Cowen, CEO of Disruptive Vision, “With indicators like 6 billion hours of YouTube video being consumed each month, it is clear that people choose video whenever it is available.
“Zoom’s video streaming platform empowers large organisations to harness the power of video to communicate, teach and collaborate by providing a consistently good viewer experience irrespective of their device – even in low bandwidth environments.”
“Video streaming is still in the early stages of adoption and application in the enterprise and education sectors. As such, we required a value-added distributor with a track record of investing in skills to reach and support new markets. Kathea is a market leader in the distribution of video conferencing and streaming products in South Africa.
“They also have a well establish vertical specialisation in higher education and the Zoom platform is perfectly fit for purpose for this sector,” he adds.
The Zoom solution eliminates the requirement for significant investment in expensive endpoint infrastructure to enable broadcasting. The solution brings both recorded and live broadcasts, with instant play and instant seek, to any device using a web browser.
“Using Zoom, universities and learning institutions can broadcast lectures live, with rich, real-time interactions, and can record these broadcasts for on-demand viewing. Marketing and communications can create enterprise television and ‘YouTube’ style channels, and broadcast company announcements in real-time. HR can use Zoom to conduct training and employee orientation.
“Enterprises can use the solution throughout the organisation to collaborate across a dispersed workforce. The potential for this solution to add value to our partner and customer community is enormous, and it is all made possible through innovative technology that is ideal for the South African market,” says David Sales, head of Product Management at Kathea.
Zoom provides an underlying platform that delivers all of the capabilities and requirements for video streaming, on-demand viewing and integrated communications.
As a fully virtualised on premise solution, there is no need to purchase dedicated appliances and define discrete disaster recovery, redundancy and backup process and with elastic provisioning makes Zoom instantly scalable to tens of thousands of employees or students simply by providing them access to the Zoom portal.
Zoom enables one-way streaming with two-way interaction capability, and the “PVR” type functionality enables users to pause and rewind even during live events. Video security is easily managed, maintained and controlled with active directory authentication, encrypted video transmission and incorporated digital rights management.
Reports can also be pulled from the solution for information on the number of views, comments and interactions around videos both live and on-demand.
Several features of Zoom make it the perfect solution for the South African market. It offers true-multilingual support, ideal for the diverse languages of the country. It also plays on any device on any available bandwidth instantly, with adaptive bit-rate streaming automatically delivering the video quality appropriate to your environment to ensure no buffering even in areas of low bandwidth.
Even the video broadcaster requires no software and this, together with complementary services offered by Kathea, this maximises user adoption and uptake, as well as return on investment (ROI).
“Video is the future, and visual communications have time and again been proven to deliver enhanced value. Zoom is an exciting innovation for the South African market, bringing the power of video streaming to within reach of many more users and potentially changing the face of both education and business,” Sales concludes.