About PlayStream

What is PlayStream?

PlayStream's small business platform provides content delivery services for thousands of businesses and consumers worldwide. PlayStream's proprietary technologies empower customers with advanced capabilities to manage, deliver and monitor audio, video, and multimedia content over the Internet. PlayStream's services for small businesses are unique because they integrate the Industry's most popular formats: RealNetworks' RealMedia, Microsoft's Windows Media, Apple's QuickTime Media, MP3 and Java Streaming, with PlayStream's proprietary technologies and robust online management tools, to provide customers with a level of simplicity, and features unparalleled in the Industry.

Why Use PlayStream?

PlayStream offers many benefits for customers seeking simple, effective and affordable solutions for deploying media over the Web. Some of these benefits include:

• High Performance Delivery of Content

  If you have ever streamed your media from an ISP, have you ever wondered why on some days, your clips seem to play great, and on other days, they barely play at all? At PlayStream, our content management and distributed network deliver virtually any media type over a very robust, dynamic network architecture that greatly improves the performance of media delivery. Working with Internap's Assimilator technologies, PlayStream deliver media via a distributed network that connects to virtually every major backbone, with routing tables dynamically adjusted on the fly to adjust to the constant changing traffic patterns on the Web. This superior technology provides dramatically improved performance compared to ISPs that utilize conventional fixed routing tables over fewer backbone connections, sending your media down the same path regardless of Web traffic conditions.

  By leveraging PlayStream's enterprise network, PlayStream currently provides its customers with direct connections to multiple Backbone Providers.

  
  

• Access Robust Technologies Without Having to Buy, Implement and Manage Them

  Keeping your server running shouldn't be a problem for your ISP, right? But your ISP probably has let your server go down for days, right? Looking for a better system? The modular architecture of PlayStream's operations eliminates single points of failure, thereby providing maximum uptime while insuring optimal performance. At PlayStream, we cluster and load-balance groups of servers into a large server farm. We then replicate that server-farm in multiple locations throughout the US, so that even our server-farms are fully backed up. At each farm, we utilize sophisticated fibre channel storage area networks that employ RAID and hot-swappable technologies. We back up all this data with robotic data libraries for disaster recovery. Then, we co-locate these farms inside of Internap and our own secure data centers, which provides robust power-backup capabilities with 24/7 security and monitoring. How much does all this cost? Hint: a lot less than the skilled technicians needed to operate, troubleshoot and maintain them. But starting at just a few dollars a month, customers receive the benefits of these technologies at PlayStream.

• Free Up Valuable Time & Restore Peace-of-Mind With Smart Support

  Ever tried calling an ISP for support regarding streaming media issues? Due to their need to stay abreast of technologies completely unrelated to this Industry, there is little time left over for their support personnel or executives to stay abreast of the rapidly changing Streaming Media Industry. As a result, you're likely to be relying on out-dated information that is backed up by little experience. If you're like many people, you felt more frustrated after asking for support than you did before asking. At PlayStream, this is all we do, and as a result, our level of support is unsurpassed in our Industry. Through our continuous research in emerging technologies such as Real Networks' Real Media, Microsoft's Windows Media, Apple's QuickTime, MPEG and Flash Streaming, PlayStream empowers customers with the right information at the right time to accelerate their time to deliver or to quickly troubleshoot technical issues that may arise down the road.

• Make Smarter Decisions By Using Smarter Information

  How many people are watching your media clips? How much of that clip are they watching? How was the quality of delivery? Smart information leads to smart decisions. At PlayStream, we fully understand the old phrase, "garbage in, garbage out." We have probably used every vendor's streaming media reporting product on the market, but when you have thousands of customers using your service in unique ways; the logging of that data just didn't work accurately with the products we tested and used. We therefore developed our own in-house proprietary reporting system to solve these problems. If you're venturing out on your own with your own servers, extrapolating your media data in the media log files can be a significant challenge (note: it is worth mentioning that streaming servers log differently than Web servers). It doesn't help matters that not only does each media format (Flash, Real, Windows Media, QuickTime, etc.) use different styles of logging, but each version of the same format may vary its logging mechanisms in some fashion. We've spent years researching this problem, and only recently, have we resolved the issues never fixed by the vendor products that we once used. If you are seeking to make smart decisions regarding delivery of your media, we are happy to say that our advanced media logging and reporting service is standard with all accounts.

Who Uses PlayStream?

Thousands of businesses and organizations are currently using PlayStream to deliver a variety of content, from educational seminars and sporting events to concerts and online entertainment. Customers range from Fortune 100 companies (now serving 3 of the top 10) to non-profit organizations and hobbyists that rely on PlayStream's online statistics to provide valuable metrics on the performance and viewership of their media.

How Do I Get Started?

The best way to start is by signing up for our FREE 15-day evaluation. This allows you to try our service with no obligation, FREE! If you like our service (be sure to see what services we offer, and what our pricing is), we offer easy month-to-month terms with no setup fees on packages that are easy to upgrade or downgrade as your needs change.