Introducing Microsoft eCDN for a New Era of Communications

Microsoft eCDN licensing is quite confusing as of now. Microsoft docs do not clear the things that license are concurrent or per user base.

They only recommend buying licenses for all company user.

Current all eCDN service provider give concurrent license.

This is great. eCDN has been available as a 3rd party solution for years. Nice to see Microsoft delivering this as a native solution. However, the pricing model, 'per user/per month' doesn't work well for eCDN solutions, where the goal is to reduce streaming content impact to a specific location's (head office) internet egress.

Distributed users on their own local internet will not see the benefit of an eCDN solution, so the licensing is not leveraged. You need lots of people streaming the same content, from the same location, at the same time. Like a corporate wide Teams Live Event streamed to users at a head office. Therefore, eCDN should be licensed by external IP, not user. IE: we license this external IP address (head office) for 400 eCDN subscribers. This would be perfect... the 1st user pulls down content from a Teams Live Event... and that user 'rebroadcasts' the content to the other 399 people in the office. Almost entirely eliminating the event's impact on the head office's local internet connection.  

I fully agree with you, Petri-X, a more technical in depth briefing would be nice.

Petri-X Some of your technical 'deeper' knowledge questions might be answered by the supporting technical overview article that wasn't referenced in the initial post. At least I found it provided a bit more insight; https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/ecdn/technical-documentation/technical-overview

Andrew Camizzi No, this is purely for more efficient delivery of the video stream with minimal impact to overall bandwidth. It has no bearing on the actual feature set available within Live Events.

Free Trial is available for 25 users over 3 months, this will at least give those interested access to the analytics dashboard and silent testing capabilities.

I like the progress here, however, I feel like the charge of $.50 per month doesn't bring very much to the table for the cost. For our company at least we have transitioned to a mostly remote workforce, peer to peer vs peer to server really doesn't do very much to help alleviate bandwidth. Would this perhaps open up using the desktop for the remote participants of a live event, or possibly open up chat functionality type of options to make the live events more feature rich?

Hi KennethML 

At least I have understood that Hive Streaming was working based on the clients P2P. They had only a control service on their site:

That was the reason I also asked, if this "agent" supporting this P2P streaming is inside Microsoft Teams client. In overall it would be nice to know deeper knowledge from this.

Petri-X it's the same functionality as Hive, Kollektive, Ramp and Riverbed supplies, but done differently.

Microsoft eCDN works using sort of a peer-2-peer transfer (much like Windows Update Delivery Optimization), so one client will stream from Teams Live Event and then forward this stream to other viewers. Where as the existing eCDN solutions are hosted on some server or appliance.

Is this something same what Hive and other vendors has done some time ago? And after these those comes needless? 3rd parties had own agents running on the client site, but is this functionality included into Teams client now? If so, will there be troubleshooting logs available on the client site as well?

texeric external encoder leverages Microsoft Stream. Microsoft eCDN support Stream as well. You'd configure the solution in the Stream admin center instead of Teams admin center. Here are instructions