United States Fish & Wildlife Service Case Study
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Business Overview
The United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS or FWS) is an agency of the US Federal Government within the US Department of the Interior dedicated to the management of fish, wildlife, and natural habitats. The mission of the agency is “working with others to conserve, protect, and enhance fish, wildlife, plants and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people.” Among the responsibilities of the FWS are enforcing federal wildlife laws, protecting endangered species, managing migratory birds, restoring nationally significant fisheries, conserving and restoring wildlife habitat, such as wetlands, helping foreign governments with their international conservation efforts, and distributing money to states’ fish and wildlife agencies through the Wildlife Sport Fish and Restoration Program.
Challenge
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS), National Conservation Training Center (NCTC) was using the Brightcove online video platform to manage video storage and distribution. Videos were marketed to viewers via different digital channels and were available for on-demand viewing or download via Fish & Wildlife training sites as well as embedded in online training courses accessed through the department’s learning management system (LMS). The vast majority of the video content is for natural conservation specialists and biologists, but several are administrative such as EEO/Diversity training or saved Service Director’s forum and broadcasts.
FWS was seeking a cloud-native solution that could provide improved video content management and administration capabilities, supported tailored branding, offered multicast to unicast failover, supported high-quality HD video delivery over the network, and had the security capabilities to support FedRAMP certification.
Solution
FWS selected Vbrick’s Rev Enterprise Video Platform for the purpose of storing and delivering on-demand- video (ODV). Users access video content housed in Rev via various links in FWS websites and Learning Management Systems. Rev provides a branded graphical user interface to manage, group and catalog videos into libraries, perform search, review viewing and bandwidth statistics. System administrators can access Rev from their government (LDAP certificate credentialed access) Windows, Macintosh, or Mobile device. FWS was able to implement Rev in one month and began the process of migrating video content to the new system. Additionally, FWS and Vbrick worked collaboratively over the course of a year to achieve FedRAMP Tailored Authorization. As a result, Vbrick is the only FedRAMP-certified vendor in the enterprise video platform market.
Benefits
With the new Rev solution implemented, FWS is able to deliver over 2,000 high-quality videos with up to 2.4 million streams/year, 10 TB delivery and 3TB managed monthly content. Moreover, the organization is now benefiting from a user interface built on the latest web technologies so the user experience is in- line with popular consumer market Netflix, YouTube and Vimeo experiences. The administration of the system is much easier than with the previous solution and now FWS can easily manage the lifecycle of all videos ensuring unlimited scaling potential. FWS benefits from real-time robust video analytics related to numbers and types of videos and viewers, bandwidth, issues, browsers, quantity, time, finished viewing, and viewing time. Lastly, the Rev solution achieved FedRAMP certification which enables other government organizations to develop enterprise video strategies using the Rev platform.
