Microsoft acquires Peer5 to improve Live Video Streaming in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft today announced the acquisition of Peer5, a company that operates peer-to-peer CDN worldwide. Peer5’s eCDN solution already has many large enterprise organizations as customers. Microsoft will leverage Peer5’s technology and expertise to expand its ability for delivering secure, high-quality, large-scale live video streaming with optimized network performance in Teams.

Details on Peer5’s technology:

• Peer5 offers a WebRTC-based eCDN solution that runs in-browser to optimize bandwidth usage helping mitigate impacts to network and line of business (LOB) applications.
• Its mesh networks are self-balancing and automatically scale as the number of viewers increase.
• The technology does not require additional installation on user endpoints or changes to the physical network infrastructure.

Microsoft also confirmed that it will continue to support 3rd party eCDN solutions from Microsoft certified partners in addition to Peer5 eCDN. Also, current Peer5 customers will be able to continue using Peer5 services.

“At Microsoft, we’ve learned that Microsoft Teams is the primary communication platform for many of our customers, and they’ve asked us for more integrated eCDN solutions for large-scale meetings and virtual events,” said Nicole Herskowitz, General Manager of Microsoft Teams.

“We’re excited to partner with Microsoft and enable our eCDN solution for their many enterprise customers with a single mouse-click. We’re eagerly looking forward to enabling live streaming for many more organizations around the world,” wrote Peer5 team.

Source: Microsoft