Archive for April 18th, 2008

Back from the show. I like taking a day or so after my last postings to look through everything I’ve collected, selecting some last items to include in a final wrapup. While that’s not a lot of time for deep reflection, I am at least far enough away from the hype of the moment to enable a bit of perspective.

At the NAB press office earlier this week I overheard an NAB official talk to the editor of one of the leading trade mags. He was asked about what he thought would be among the most exciting developments of the show. Instead, he begged off answering, stating that as far as he was concerned it was all just a rehash. He could find nothing new or interesting worth commenting on. more

Media Excel was the last company that I saw at NAB, but last was certainly not least in this instance. The company’s real time encoders for mobile, web and IP TV, recently anointed by MTV and MobiTV, looked very, very impressive.

The company targets broadcasters and other very high volume streaming producers and builds their Hera real time encoding boxes using Texas Instruments DaVinci DSP (digital signal processor). The chip is programmable, so it will support later codec updates, and reportedly scary fast. more

As streaming becomes more technologically advanced and complicated, it’s easy to forget that the most basic streaming video-related need for many organizations is to synchronize a video of a speaker with his or her PowerPoint slides. Though Accordent does many more things than this, they offer two of the best products I’ve seen for streaming PowerPoint with video.

The Accordent Capture Station is a computer/appliance you can take with you on site to stream the presentation live, and/or capture it for later streaming. You connect the presenter’s computer to the appliance via a VGA connector to capture the PowerPoint slides, and plug the video feed into an Osprey card. The Accordent software captures and synchronizes the stream, captures it to disk, and can push it out to a remote streaming server. more

Video over cell phones is one of the hottest topics facing video producers, but most organizations lack the technical expertise and/or capital to make it happen. If you’d like to dip your toe in the water, check out the Mobile Video Managed Service from Vidiator.

Operationally, you upload your videos to the Vidiator site, who transcodes them and sends you a link to post on your web site. Or, you can create your own mobile-phone accessible web-site using Vidiator tools. In the booth, the company captured video from a web-cam, uploaded it to their service, and then transmitted it to a cell phone in the booth where it played with minimal latency and good quality.

I saw the Vidiator folks in a 10×10 booth in the Central Hall, which initially raised my eyebrows, but learned that they’re owned by Hutchison Whampoa Ltd, a $40 billion Hong Kong company. Hutchison developed the cellular streaming technology for in-house use, and is now taking it out of house via Vidiator. Both the service and technology felt mature and well thought out, and at $99/month for 10,000 minutes of cellular viewing, it’s certainly affordable.