* Safeway uses IP-over-satellite for economical distance learning
After 20 years of using broadcast satellite service to disperse TV-style training videos and music to stores, Safeway, a North American food and drug retailer, decided it wanted to leverage new streaming-and-multicast-to-the-desktop technologies to communicate with its 2,000 locations and 200,000 employees.
In January, the company began targeting the delivery of this content, plus local advertising, using a combination of satellite services from Loral Skynet, IP networking equipment and security technology from SkyStream Networks and Cisco IP/TV technology.
“We wanted to get some stuff to the desktop for confidentiality,” explains Dan Pryor, Safeway vice president of corporate communications and media. “Now, we can password-protect the communications and make sure who’s watching it.” He says his former, broadcast-based service didn’t support IP, which was necessary for the security, multicast, and interactive nature of the new types of communications at hand.
“Our goal was high-quality video to locations for training – such as teaching store employees how to run the meat department – corporate communications and, in the future, digital signage,” he explains.
Here’s how the new network works and what Safeway is getting out of it:
* Content is hosted at Safeway’s Pleasanton, Calif., headquarters, where content servers are linked to a SkyStream Source Media Router.
* The SkyStream Source Media Router provides an 8M-bit/sec satellite uplink. It captures the IP content, encapsulates it into digital video broadcasting (DVB) format, encrypts it using SkyStream’s SecureStream Triple-DES encryption and sends it to the TelStar satellite using Pragmatic General Multicast (PGM) protocol. With PGM, SkyStream says, the author of the broadcast is guaranteed that all data is delivered to the intended receivers or is informed of any unrecoverable data packet loss.
* At each receiving site, a SkyStream Edge Video Router (EVR) 7000 captures the content, then passes it onto an Ethernet port or sends it to a local hard drive and records it. Every store receiver downloads content at 8M bit/sec. The EVR, says Pryor, is “sort of a cross between a satellite receiver and an IP router,” and will also support a standard terrestrial modem or DSU/CSU for landline backup.
“While you are transmitting, you can target particular locations [by virtue of the multicast capability]. For example, if there is [an in-store] commercial we only want to roll in Las Vegas stores, we can send that content out have it recorded only to those stores,” Pryor says.
Among the Safeway applications:
* 2M bit/sec streaming video at MPEG-2 quality to the desktop, 24-7.
* PC-based media servers in all stores, each with 17G bytes of MP3 music files – in which commercials can be inserted – are frequently refreshed. This requires large amounts of bandwidth – more than the company’s 56K bit/sec terrestrial network can handle.
* Video-on-demand to TVs and desktops account for multiple times zones.
What are the cost implications of the satellite-based system?
“If we didn’t do it this way, we would have needed five or six T-1s to 2,000 locations to get 8M bit/sec, which is completely cost-prohibitive,” says Pryor.
He explains that satellite charges reflect a fixed, flat fee per month based on the uplink speed, and that it doesn’t matter how many receivers are connected to it. So the company can scale as large as it likes with no additional incremental recurring service costs.
“This comes out to 1/100th or 1/1000th the price of using multiple T-1s to each site,” Pryor says.
The ROI on the whole system was about a four-month payback in “sustainable, measurable business results,” he says.
