Some network applications have requirements that exceed the service levels offered by the best-effort Internet. Several network-layer Quality of Service architectures with extended service levels have been designed, but the massive scale and distributed nature of the Internet have prohibited their wide deployment. It now seems clear that the special needs of demanding applications must be met through other approaches. This paper describes how incrementally-deployed innovative solutions at the network level can contribute to an improved service for a particular type of applications, namely high-quality, wide-area video conferencing. We have built a global IP network, aiming to give users a better video conferencing experience primarily through packet loss reduction in transport networks. The key concept in our approach is a well-provisioned network-layer overlay, combined with geography-based "cold potato" BGP routing. Through an extensive set of experiments we show how our design choices impact routing and data plane behavior in the network, and demonstrate that we are able to significantly reduce packet loss compared to wide-area transport through global transit providers.