I recently signed up for Comcast broadband and just got my first invoice-in the form of a custom video. Pretty cool idea given that broadband users run the gamut from tech-savvy to technology laggards, and the bill lays the charges out in a very clear manner. If you’re a Comcast user, this is probably old…
There have been a lot of quick hit articles both praising and bashing DASH, but few scholarly articles that take a deep look at the technology, its promise and limited progress to date. In a new article up on the Streaming Media website, entitled MPEG-DASH: Making Tracks Toward Widespread Adoption, Adrian Pennington takes a long…
I gave this talk at the Streaming Forum in London in June 2013. Here’s the description: Most publishers today have to distribute to three sets of screens; desktop, mobile and OTT. This session will start by detailing the playback capabilities and technology compatibilities of all three platforms. Then it will explore the technical issues and…
I was scanning through some news videos for a consulting project and noticed a CBS News interview with special prosecutor Angela Corey after the Treyvon Martin/George Zimmerman verdict. The scheme as simple and produced an elegant look, so I thought I would share. As you can see in the image below, the interviewer and interviewee…
One of the coolest new features in Adobe Premiere Pro CC is the ability to create, edit and output closed captions. In this tutorial I’ll introduce you to those caption-related features, using some of the content that I used in my book, Premiere Pro CC: Visual QuickStart Guide, which is available now on Amazon. Click over to…
I’ve long been a DASH skeptic, for multiple reasons, including the fact that the standard was so broad so as to be almost unusable. That is, since DASH supports multiple codecs and container formats, there’s no mechanism to ensure compatibility. So, if Mozilla adds DASH playback support that decodes WebM encoded video in an MPEG-2…
We put the first generation of the recently released ProMedia Xpress through a variety of tests, looking at performance, quality, closed captions, and more.
Two early experiences shaped my view on standards and industry coalitions. Since I’ve been so publicly down on WebM, HTML5, and DASH, I thought I would share them. The first experience was in the mid-1990s. I was running a small company that sold PC fax boards that allowed computers to send faxes to fax machines,…
I’ll be teaching a webinar for the Poynter News University on Thurday, July 18 at 2:00 PM EST. The title is How to Make Video Play Across Multiple Screens, and that describes the content. The course is entry level by design, so won’t get bogged down in technical details. Here’s the description from the sign-up…
During the first few months of 2013, I had to privilege to write the Adobe Premiere Pro CC Visual QuickStart Guide (VQS) with Shawn Lam, who penned three of the fifteen chapters. I’ve always liked the VQS format, which features quick hit, detailed answers, rather than the start to finish tutorials provided by the Classroom…