In the News: Blocking video in the workplace

The NCAA tournament brought video blocking into the news again. In addition to the article linked above, the San Jose Mercury News also ran a front page article on the possibility of video streaming from the tournament eating up all the bandwidth of workplace internet links. Other newspapers ran articles on this topic across the nation and stories on this topic filled radio airwaves including NPR broadcasts.

At the root of the debate of course was whether or not to block access to the NCAA site which offers streaming video of the tournament that began yesterday. Blocking access would preserve bandwidth for the mission critical applications of the organization, but not all organizations have a method to block streaming video. An astute network administrator would realize immediately that a proxy would give that ability without having to block the entire internet.

An even better solution would be a proxy that takes that video stream from the internet only once rather than allowing multiple streams of the same data from the same site, and then sends off separate streams of data for each requestor on the local network. This feature is often referred to as a CDN (content delivery network), and is featured prominently on some proxies.

Unfortunately I didn't see any articles this week proposing CDN's in organizations as a solution to this issue.