Streaming Learning Center

I was the opening act for NAB 2013, speaking at at 8:00 AM on Saturday morning for the Society of Broadcast Engineers (SBE). The talk was on Producing for Multiple Screen Delivery and a surprisingly enthusiastic group of around 300+ broadcast engineers showed up despite the hour (you can download the handout below). Not to boast, but I'll share a post-talk email from John Poray, the Executive Director of the SBE, who stated, "Our thanks to you! You provided a great opening for our programming. Tough to get people out at 8 am on a Saturday in LV but you garnered the largest opening crowd we’ve had since we started doing this in 1995."

Click over the main article to download the handout.

In March, I visited Moscow to speak at the Connected TV Forum. You can read about the trip and download the handouts by clicking over to the main article.

H.265/High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the successor codec to H.264, which, like H.264, is jointly developed by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group and ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG). The primary goal of the new codec is 50 percent better compression efficiency than H.264 and support for resolutions up to 8192x4320.

Live event streaming while on the road requires an encoder that's as powerful as it is portable. In this Buyer's Guide, I'll detail the categories to consider when buying a portable encoder, along with factors to consider to help identify the best product for your needs. Specially, I'll discuss software encoders, portable hardware encoders, and on-camera encoders, though exclusively for Ethernet or Wi-Fi transmission, as cellular models are covered in another Buyer's Guide.

Is 2013 the year of encoding in the cloud? Actually, it might be, at least for live transcoding in the cloud, and even on-demand transcoding should see significant migration to cloud facilities.

Choosing a live streaming encoding tool used to be simple: You typically would encode a single stream for delivery to your desktop viewers, and budget was the most important buying criteria. When buying today, of course, you've almost certainly expanded your target viewers to include both mobile and desktop clients, with adaptive streaming preferred over single file delivery.

Many streaming producers are increasing the number of mobile and over-the-top (OTT) platforms that they support while implementing adaptive streaming to enhance the viewing experience on each. There are two ways to accomplish this: produce a unique set of streams for each target, or derive one smaller group of files that will effectively serve all platforms. In this How-To article, I'll explore the latter approach.

So you've been tasked (or you decided) to produce If you're working in a small home or office with a webcast from your office. Congratulations, it's a great way to communicate directly with one or hundreds of viewers. Of course, one critical factor impacting how effectively you communicate is the quality of your audio and video. In this article, I'll explore a range of tips and techniques you can use to maximize that quality.

First, video compression is a garbage in/garbage out medium, so output quality improves with input quality. Second, codecs such as H.264 are lossy, which means the lower the data rate, the lower the quality. Finally, intermediate formats such as ProRes preserve much higher quality than codecs such as H.264, albeit at much higher data rates.

I recently taught several seminars on producing video for HTML5, and I started my preparation with some research to see how the WebM codec was being used to determine the focus and scope of my WebM-related materials. In case you’ve forgotten — and you wouldn’t be the only one—WebM is the open source format Google launched in 2010, built around the VP8 video codec that Google acquired in its purchase of On2 Technologies.