Archive of the Content Delivery Category

Serendipity on the show floor makes for impromptu sessions. Tuesday I ran into cinematographer Bill Bennett in front of the Sony F35 parked on a dolly in front of Brand Pro’s booth. Not much to say about the F35–35 means its newly developed single CCD is the size of a Super 35mm film frame–except that it’s as impressively thought out as last year’s F23 on which it’s based, and like its double first cousin, Panavision’s Genesis, did once, it sets a new highwater mark in 4:4:4 RGB high-end digital cinematography cameras.

Well, for $250,000 without lens, it ought to. A lot to pay in weak dollars for tighter depth-of-field and better dynamic range than the F23, plus 1-50 fps variable speed in 4:4:4 (compared to F23’s 1-30). But you do get every pixel you pay for. This is a full-on 1920×1080 RGB image—no Bayer interpolation of phantom R and B pixels here, no sir. Leave that to lowly CMOS cameras like the REDs, Silicon Imaging 2Ks and Minis, and Arri D21s (at NAB upgraded from D20 with new 2K RAW data output mode). 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.

HP announced it is the first company to release Microsoft’s Media Center Extender capability to an Internet-connected TV.

With the capability, people using HP MediaSmart TVs not only get access to rich content from the Internet but they also can enjoy their own digital treasures from their home PCs on a big screen high-definition TV (HDTV). Read on at The Briefing Room

More 2008 NAB Show news from The Briefing Room

Harris had its press conference on Sunday. This news is coming a bit late, of course, but that’s probably because the conference was aimed more at broadcasters than content producers, so it’s a bit outside our usual area of coverage. Still, you’ll want to pay attention to this news, as it has implications for the new ways the public will be accessing and viewing video in the next few years.

Among the news about its various broadcast systems (servers, routers, DTV transmitters), Harris also discussed its MPH initiative that it’s undertaking with display manufacturers Zenith and LG. MPH, which stands for “mobile/pedestrian/handheld,” aims to send video to mobile devices via “in-band” transmission — over the air, within the existing digital spectrum available to broadcasters. more

I just came from the extremely amusing “Trusting Talent: My Damn Channel” panel presentation at the Content Theater in the Central Hall. And besides being rather chuckle inducing (you should really check out “You Suck at Photoshop” and other programming at www.mydamnchannel.com ), it was actually rather thought provoking.

The entertainment site’s president/CEO, Rob Barnett, showed up with two stars/programmers of two of the eight channels on My Damn Channel–internet/cable TV oddball Andy Milonakis and legendary comedian/satirist/author/actor Harry Shearer, and in between clips and jokes, they proffered their theory that My Damn Channel and certain other entertainment sites finally have a chance at success now that “the bandwidth is finally there,” in Barnett’s words. He laid out a business model that doesn’t attempt to craft a new paradigm so much as combine old and new paradigms together. more

Adobe Systems Incorporated announced that it plans to lead an initiative to define an industry-wide open file format for digital cinema files to streamline workflows and help ensure easy archiving and exchange. Adobe intends to leverage its successful Digital Negative Specification (DNG) file format as a foundation, and Adobe plans to work with a broad coalition of leading camera manufacturers, including Panavision, Silicon Imaging, Dalsa, Weisscam, and ARRI—along with software vendors, including Iridas and The Foundry, and codec provider CineForm—to define the requirements for an open, publicly documented file format that it plans to call CinemaDNG. Read on at The Briefing Room

More 2008 NAB Show news from The Briefing Room

As HBO’s Christian Wilson urged me to do on Sunday, I stopped by the Aspera booth (SU15509) this morning to learn more about that company’s high-speed file transfer software suite. I was fortunate to run into Michelle Munson, Aspera’s president and co-founder, while I was there, and she filled me in on the company’s story.

While the technical explanation of how Aspera’s “fasp 2.0″ software suite addresses the twin issues of speed and ultra-security for major entertainment clients like HBO, Technicolor, Ascent Media, EFilm, and many others–most of whom are building Aspera, one way or another, into their larger digital asset management suite of tools–is interesting and important, I was most struck by another part of the story Munson addressed. more

At the Adobe dinner last night Mark Randall described NAB 2008 as the “year of plumbing.” Without a lot of blockbuster product releases (especially for the desktop), there’s a lot of truth to that statement. So what we’re seeing is a lot of infrastructure gear that’s not incredibly “sexy” (sorry, I can’t believe I just typed that) but is, or will be, incredibly useful.

Take 3Gbps HD-SDI transmission technology. This year (and somewhat last year) we’ve seen a wealth of products that can input and output 3Gbps worth of data i.e. video — it’s all over the show floor. Why is this number significant? Traditional single-link HD-SDI works out to 1.5Gbps. Dual-link HD-SDI and the newer 3G-SDI (which operates over a single coaxial cable) can handle 3Gbps. Standard HD-SDI can handle the transmission of 1080i video; dual-link HD-SDI and 3G-SDI open up the possibility of transmitting 1080p, 4:4:4 RGB, 2K “film” data, and stereoscopic 1080i. more