The network demands are great. Bandwidth consumption is keeping some companies from providing streaming services. A large engineering firm recently instituted a policy that forbids streaming audio or video to the desktop because of the drain on resources, says an employee, who asked not to be identified. It's ironic, though. The technical people who set the policy are the ones who showed us how cool the streaming technology is in the first place.
Some vendors downplay bandwidth concerns.
What IT managers are really dealing with is just fear of the unknown. A factor related to bandwidth is whether content is viewed live or on demand. The need to provide high bandwidth connections means significant infrastructure issues to IT managers. They want to know, for instance, how the additional bandwidth will impact the number of servers needed to support continuous, high-rate streams. So if a company has 5,000 users who want to access a CEO's speech, that's 5 Gbps worth of network bandwidth needed at one time.