Archive of the Streaming Media Category

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

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

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

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

Digital Rapids Just Gets It

By the time this NAB is over, I’ll have seen at least five companies that produce enterprise class streaming encoding tools, and each has a different flavor. I left Digital Rapids booth thinking, “man, this company just gets it.”

For example, the two most important encoding features that streaming producers now need are the ability to export in Adobe’s new F4V format, and to access the Windows Media Video encoding tweaks that until recently were available only via the WMV PowerToy or by encoding using Microsoft’s command line interface. Not surprisingly, version 2.5 of Digital Rapid’s StreamPro and StreamEnterprise support both features, as well as GXF and MXF input support, also increasingly important capabilities. Digital Rapids also announced new integration features with Rimage DVD/Blu-ray recorder/printers that lets their customers burn DVDs from the Digital Rapids software.

The other product that caught my eye was the Digital Rapids Broadcast Manager that could be a huge help for companies encoding and distributing high volumes of live streams. It provides a great preview capability of all sources (see the screen), automated failover should any encoding node fail and visual scheduling for encoding tasks.

Origin Digital, a global video applications service provider, announced its support of video applications on Microsoft SharePoint Server and for applications using Web tools in Microsoft Silverlight. Origin Digital will showcase its Web-based Odaptor solution that seamlessly aggregates, manages, transforms, and distributes digital content and video anywhere, in any format, for any device or screen, in the Microsoft exhibit during the NAB Show in Las Vegas, April 14-17, 2008. Read on at The Briefing Room

More 2008 NAB Show news from The Briefing Room

I’m here with Andy Beach of Inlet Technologies, who’s given a few presentations on the state of streaming media here at NAB 2008 and had some really interesting insights on the ongoings in the industry ant the NAB Show. Andy take it away:

Thanks Craig! And thanks very much for letting me ramble on about what i’ve seen here at the show. I was very pleased with the turnout I saw on Monday. It’s always seemed slower to me on Monday’s, so I was surprised by how many folks showed up and were asking all the right questions. more