Blue Coat Optimizes Encrypted Flash Video

Blue Coat Systems, Inc. continued to advance its video delivery message by adding  the ability to scale and optimize encrypted Adobe Flash video to its Mach5 appliance.

The addition of optimization for RTMPe and RTMPte encrypted Flash expands the MACH5 capabilities to optimize video used by providers for maintaining end-user digital rights management (DRM). This will be important for  enterprises looking to publish their news and content through cloud-delivered video services.

Disclosure: Silver Peak is one of my clients and I own stock options in the company. Silver Peak competes with Riverbed.

The introduction complements Blue Coat's existing work in the video space which includes a combination of stream-splitting, pre-population and video caching technologies to scale the use of live or on-demand internal company video, as well as external Web video.  File formats already supported include Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, HTML5, QuickTime and Microsoft Windows Media.

While video support continues to be important for all organizations, encrypted video will  appeal to a  specific subset of users. Leading WAN optimization solutions already improve video delivery though encrypted video is another matter.

IT pros making a significant investment in the MACH5 will want to look at the performance and long term viability of Blue Coat in general and the MACH5 in particular. The company went private last year due to falling revenues, despite a boomer year in WAN optimization overall.

Part of the problem, from a technical standpoint, has been the product's performance. Blue Coat has traditionally not scaled well, struggling to reach above 300 Mbps of WAN throughput. The company only introduced a 1Gbit optimizer the SG9000 series last May.