Case Study

Video for Internal Communications at

Motorola Mobility

MediaPlatform, Inc.
8383 Wilshire Boulevard
Suite 750
Beverly Hills, CA 90211
(310) 909-8410
info@mediaplatform.com
www.mediaplatform.com
0
 Internal Communications at Motorola Mobility

Introduction

Webcasting and video communications offer many benefits to corporate communicators.

For Motorola Mobility, they are among the most efficient, engaging, and effective
enterprise communication tools available. Widely used throughout the company,
webcasts help foster employee connectivity and strengthen the corporate culture
through high-impact communications among everyone from remote sales teams and
satellite workers to staff at headquarters.

Colin Evans, IT systems engineer at Motorola Mobility, delivers more than 200 webcasts
a year to the company’s worldwide workforce of approximately 16,300. The webcast
events vary in scope, but in some cases Evans’ group
is expected to reach every worker with a live video
stream.

As the strategic importance and volume of webcasts at

the company has grown, Evans and his team needed
to address growing enterprise requirements for Motorola Mobility is a telecommunications
successful internal media stream delivery, whether for equipment corporation owned by Google,
Inc. Motorola Mobility uses innovative
town hall meetings, sales kick-offs, training and e-
technology with human insights to create
learning, or executive addresses. Enterprise-scale experiences that simplify, connect and
webcasting was becoming increasingly difficult to enrich people's lives. Motorola Mobility's
achieve using Motorola’s aging, homegrown system, portfolio includes converged mobile
based on Windows Media technology. devices such as smartphones and tablets;
wireless accessories; end-to-end video
The Search for Affordable Enterprise and data delivery; and management
solutions, including set-tops and data-
Webcasting access devices. Motorola Mobility has
16,300 employees and is headquartered
The company needed a more advanced webcasting in Libertyville, Illinois USA.
solution that could support sophisticated executive
communications, reach the entire company, and play on virtually any platform, device,
or browser. Among the biggest challenges, however, was the need to webcast on a
network that was not multicast-enabled - Motorola Mobility did not want to invest in a
full-on network infrastructure upgrade. The unicasting system could not manage more
than one webcast at a time and it was not compatible with the Firefox browser, Mac
computers, or Linux machines. In addition, webcasts could only be streamed from
headquarters, limiting the “voices” of other locations.

“We partner heavily with Internal Communications. They’re our biggest ‘customer’ and
they know our service the best,” says Evans. “They fully understood the growing
impossibility of professionally producing multiple simultaneous webcasts and reaching
16,000 employees worldwide on a network that was not multicast-enabled.”

At the same time as Motorola Mobility had to replace the old system, cost avoidance was
paramount. Evans and his team considered running everything over conference bridges,
but estimated it would cost more than $1 million a year. Costly infrastructure upgrades

1
 Internal Communications at Motorola Mobility

such as IP Multicast enabling networks, eCDN or WAN optimization devices were also
ruled out, based on their expense and complexity.

Multicasting with Adobe Technology

After evaluating several alternatives to replace Motorola Mobility’s homegrown video

system, Evans and his team selected a solution that combines Adobe Media Enterprise
Server and MediaPlatform software, based on the Open Source Media Framework.
Adobe and MediaPlatform, an Adobe Solution Partner, collaborated on testing and
implementing the new solution, resulting in one of the world’s first enterprise instances
of multicasting using Adobe Flash technology.

The Motorola Mobility webcasting solution enables

Evans and his team to produce multiple
simultaneous webcasts using MediaPlatform.
MediaPlatform is designed for professional,
interactive webcast production, giving producers
the ability to stream video from multiple sources,
both live and prerecorded, synchronize video with
Microsoft PowerPoint slides; and conduct question
and answer sessions, surveys, and polls.

Multicasting is made possible by peer-to-peer (P2P)

networking using the Real Time Media Flow
Protocol (RTMFP) within Adobe Media Enterprise
Server. The video streams to end users using
Adobe technology on a P2P network inside the
firewall.

The peer-assisted capability, known as Application-

Level Multicasting, allows Motorola Mobility to reach
virtually every user on its internal network—without
having to multicast-enable the network or invest in any infrastructure upgrades. The
peering is securely managed and governed using Adobe Media Enterprise Server. “For a
company the size of Motorola Mobility, having the ability to control the peering process
using Adobe Media Enterprise Server is a critical requirement of our webcasting
solution,” says Evans.

Motorola Mobility chose an atypical but forward-looking approach to deploying the

combined Adobe and MediaPlatform solution. Adobe Media Enterprise Server is hosted
on-premise within Motorola Mobility’s datacenters, running on a standard Microsoft
Windows server configuration. MediaPlatform is cloud-based, hosted at Amazon Web
Services. This hybrid configuration offers several advantages, including the ability to
harness a powerful webcasting tool without having to install and maintain the entire
system on-premise.

2
 Internal Communications at Motorola Mobility

Global Reach, Without the High Cost

The benefits for Motorola Mobility include enhanced communication, cost savings, and
ultimately, a stronger company culture based on improved communications. The level of
interactivity and professionalism of webcasts has soared.

When compared to using conference bridges, according to Evans, Motorola Mobility

saved over $1 million a year. Additional cost savings were derived from the avoidance of
network upgrade costs, which would have been substantial; the elimination of on-
premise infrastructure and support costs for the webcasting tools; and a reduction in the
use of telephone conference lines.

“When we told Internal Communications that we were avoiding more than $1 million a
year in conference-bridge costs by using Adobe Media Enterprise Server and
MediaPlatform, they spread the word to all the departments,” says Evans. “Everyone
started knocking on our door. There is no other way to communicate internally so cost
effectively.”

With the cost savings, Motorola has equipped all four of its studios in North America so
that webcasts can originate from all of its main locations. In corporate culture terms,
this capability connects all parts of the company, giving each center a voice to be shared
with the whole organization. For Motorola Mobility, the new webcasting solution helps
unite the organization through shared goals, and lends a renewed sense of teamwork to
a global workforce.

About MediaPlatform
MediaPlatform, Inc. is the best-in-class enterprise video platform that delivers live
webcasting and on-demand streaming to global enterprises and media producers.
MediaPlatform customers include Accenture, Ernst and Young, Facebook, General
Motors and Oracle. MediaPlatform software enables high-impact presentations for
corporate communications, training and marketing.

MediaPlatform, Inc.
8383 Wilshire Boulevard
Suite 750
Beverly Hills, CA 90211
(310) 909-8410
Sales_inquiries@mediaplatform.com
www.mediaplatform.com