Powered by Hive Streaming, Kemira extends internal video communications company-wide

Company background

Kemira is a global chemicals company serving customers in water-intensive industries. In 2021, they had annual revenue of around EUR 2.7 billion and 5,000 employees.

Kemira shares are listed on the Nasdaq Helsinki Ltd. Kemira provides expertise, application know-how, and chemicals that improve customers’ product quality, process and resource efficiency.

Their focus is on pulp & paper, oil & gas, and water treatment. They drive growth through outstanding people, high-performing organization, product, and service innovations, and a strengthened presence in selected emerging markets.

Kemira has business presence across 6 continents.

The challenge

In a company with over 5,000 employees spread across 6 continents, regular company-wide communication and dialogue is critical to ensure all employees are aligned with the corporate strategy and that they feel involved in the company’s overall success.

Kemira recognizes that video is the most vibrant and engaging means for leadership and employees to convey their message to large, far-flung audiences. Live video is considered to be more engaging than a conference call and most definitely more impactful than e-mail.

Kemira found that broadcasting town hall meetings to employees had its challenges. Many attempts had been made to reach employees with live video but large, inefficient, and less than satisfactory tradeoffs needed to be made. Even though they had the deep video expertise of FLIK, a digital video agency, they lacked enterprise video delivery capabilities and had to stream video at low quality and gather people in a central location rather than have employees view the webcast from their desks. Even with these less than ideal arrangements, many employees were not able to view the webcast.

The approach of sending one video stream to each person wanting to watch the video (unicast via a CDN) was not good enough.

With video quality maxed out at 400kbps and broadcasts only able to be conducted from a central location, management was demanding a better solution that would:

• Make better use of network resources
• Eliminate impact on user applications
• Improve monitoring and reporting of event performance
• Extend the broadcast capability companywide
• Improve video quality for all users
• Integrate with Microsoft Office 365, Skype Meeting Broadcast Struu video content management system provided by FLIK

The evaluation process

Kemira embarked on a search for a solution that would enable them to fully embrace internal video communications.

Early in the evaluation process it became clear that a software-based solution with efficient delivery capabilities was compelling due to the lack of investment required in capital equipment and maintenance.

Also, the ability to integrate with Office 365, Skype Meeting Broadcast and their FLIK video content management system would leverage those investments and increase adoption throughout Kemira globally.

Video analytics and reporting were also critical. Not just the widely available macro statistics like the number of viewers, time viewed, and average bit rate, but also the reporting of actual user experience by individual user and measures of quality of experience by region, so that accurate and timely trouble-shooting could take place.

The decision

At the completion of the evaluation phase, Kemira decided that Hive Streaming met their selection criteria:

• Incredibly efficient at utilizing existing network resources: optimal network offload down to one stream per site
• Eliminated impact on user applications during broadcasts
• Minimal maintenance and more cost effective due to being a software-based solution
• Comprehensive and detailed live monitoring and reporting of event performance
• Ability to reach every Kemira desktop
• Improved video quality for all users – over 1.5Mbps to most users
• Microsoft Office 365, Skype Meeting Broadcast and Struu integration and team endorsement

As well as meeting their evaluation criteria, the team at Kemira was very impressed with the Hive Streaming Silent Testing which enabled the Kemira team to run tests in the background, without impacting users, to make sure their network was ready for a broadcast.