OK, I’ll be honest, the headline is strictly for grabbing eyeballs. Still, on several videos that I checked, Adobe is using HTML5 for delivery, rather than Flash, going as far as to encode in VP8 for Firefox playback (rather than falling back to Flash and using H.264). Here’s the short backstory. I received an email from Adobe’s PR team to …
Read More »Webinar: Leverage Existing Video End Points and Infrastructure with Webcasting
I’ll be moderating a webinar for Talkpoint on how companies can leverage their existing infrastructures with webcasting. The date is August 19th, 2014 at 11:00am EST, and speakers will include Adam Bell, Global Digital Marketing, from Mastercard, and Paul Leninger, Marketing Manager at GENBAND. Here’s the description. You can register for the webinar by clicking here. Many enterprises that have …
Read More »Another 5-Star Review for Video Compression Book
I just got another 5-star review for compression book Producing Streaming Video for Multiple Screen Delivery, this one from Joshua Horowitz who commented, “I wish they offered a class based on this book in undergrad.” Well, here’s the whole review. Blushing, thanks Joshua. Actually, not to boast, but this is the tenth 5-star review, out of ten reviews. I’m just …
Read More »Wowza VP Chris Knowlton Demos New Streaming Engine User Interface
Wowza Streaming Engine (formerly Wowza Media Server) debuted its new graphical user interface in February, 2014. In the words of Wowza CEO David Stubenvoll: If you wanted to do iOS streaming in Wowza 3 you had to hand code in three locations, but now, in Wowza Streaming Engine, it’s a radio button. Our intent is to get Wowza into the …
Read More »Harmonic Cloud Encoding Demo
Harmonic went from no cloud encoding offerings to three cloud encoding offerings in a matter of months. In this video, Bryant Maness, product manager for file transcoding, demonstrates all three. The first allows you to add cloud nodes to your WFS system. If you’re running short of a capacity for a batch job, it’s a great way to temporarily (and …
Read More »Harmonic CMO Peter Alexander Describes Company’s Cloud Strategy
With gross revenue in the $400 million range ($108 million for Q2 2014), Harmonic Inc. is one of the largest encoding companies on the planet, but they’ve been strangely quiet on the cloud-encoding front. This changed around NAB 2014, when the company announced their cloud strategy, which included their own cloud service, ProMedia Carbon MP, plus partnerships with Encoding.com and …
Read More »MediaPlatform PrimeTime Review: A Sleek Enterprise YouTube
I’m getting pretty excited about enterprise YouTube products in general; particularly after writing about the value eBay saw in their enterprise system (see eBay Embraces Enterprise YouTube). I also liked, but wasn’t overwhelmed by, the Silverlight-based Vidizmo EnterpriseTube. I recently reviewed PrimeTime, an enterprise YouTube platform from MediaPlatform, and found it all that and a bag of chips, as saucy …
Read More »Insights from the Ooyala Global Video Index
Ooyala is one of the top three online video platforms (OVP) and releases a quarterly “video index” that “measures the anonymized viewing habits of viewers in 239 countries and territories, from Argentina to Zimbabwe, around the world,” and reports on those findings. You can download the document at the Ooyala website here. This quarter’s (Q1 2014) report heads with a …
Read More »Encoding in the Cloud or On Premise
I was once a skeptic on cloud encoding, but over the last 12 months have become a believer. In my Streaming Media article, The Cloud Vs. On-Premises Encoding Dilemma, I discuss why, discussing three classes of companies. The first should go directly to the cloud. The second should go hybrid, encoding normal demand on-premise and overflow in the cloud. The …
Read More »Don’t Buy that UHD TV: It May Go Obsolete Faster Than You Think
Holiday buying season is right around the corner, and soon you’ll be subjected to advertising from multiple sources to buy a new UHD TV set. I like shiny new objects as much as the next guy, but before you succumb, you should know that there’s a good chance that the set will be obsolete within the next couple of years. …
Read More »