Kulabyte caught my attention as a brash startup several years ago, with an oversized NAB booth and bold claims of the fastest VP6 encoder available. Though I frequently asked for review copies, the software never materialized, and the company seemingly went into stealth mode.

I just met with the president, Peter Forman, in a considerably smaller booth on the show floor. Over the last two years, Kulabyte focused on the live event streaming market, with some impressive results, including contracts with the US government for gear deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, Kulabyte was MySpace’s technology partner for the 2008 “Operation MySpace” live concert webcast from Kuwait, which was streamed at 720p at less than 1.5 megabits per second.

At NAB, in conjunction with NextComputing, Kulabyte was introducing their XStreamCast Traveler, a luggable touchscreen based portable computer for live event H.264 streaming. Configured with either four or eight cores, and a Blackmagic Decklink HD Extreme card, the unit ingests HD SDI and outputs up to four or eight H.264 streams maxing out at 720p. XStreamCast Traveler is targeted at the live event streaming market.

Forman stated that Kulabyte’s unique value add was patent pending technology that allows them to implement 2 pass encoding on a live stream. As a result, their video quality is the best available, and the stream has a very consistent data rate irrespective of changes in the video content. Forman attributes wins with the US government and several large broadcasters to these two attributes. Interestingly, Forman also noted that virtually all of Kulabyte’s live event customers had switched from VP6 to H.264.

Not to go case study maudlin on you, but overall, it’s a nice story. Rather than seeking to conquer the entire world of Flash encoding, Kulabyte found a growing niche, concentrated their development and marketing efforts, and now seems to have a very defensible technology and marketing advantage. Plus some lovely contracts in hand, which from where I sit, beats a ream of empty press releases any day.