Blogs

The thing about webinars produced from your desk is that they seem to invite you to use poor quality gear. Yeah, you could setup an external microphone, but that mic on your webcam is just sooo convenient. Or, you think that a $15 lavaliere mic from Amazon will provide the absolute quality boost that you need. Whenever you consider what …

I recently heard a story about the power of captioning and translation that I wanted to share. By way of background, I was writing a story about cloud encoding, talking to various users to learn why they choose to encode in the cloud, rather than on premise. One of the companies I spoke with was Dotsub, which provides captioning and …

I got a email question yesterday that went like this: Please forgive me if this question sounds obvious but when I encode a master clip for different streaming outputs (using AME C6) I end up with a different file for each separate outlet. A file for YouTube, a file for the iPad etc. Do the big providers like YouTube have …

One of the benefits of HEVC is supposed to be that it delivers the same quality of H.264 at 50% of the data rate. However, since there’s little data rate standardization, it’s tough to tell what that means. After all, it means one thing if you produce your H.264-encoded H.264 video at 2 mbps, quite another at 3.5 mbps. I’m …

One of the most popular downloads from the Streaming Learning Center was our original streaming media primer. Now we’re releasing a new primer, covering the materials shown in the table of contents below. The primer is a component of my new Udemy course, Mastering the Adobe Media Encoder. It started out as a document to explain most of the terms …

I had a great opportunity to write a case study on eBay’s use of Qumu’s enterprise YouTube product. Sometimes, these discussions are strictly technical, the bits and bytes, procedures and workflows, that kind of thing. While I covered that with eBay’s Ryan Burnham, what really got interesting was how he saw the YouTube product, and the functionality they were building …

For this review of the Vidizmo EnterpriseTube, which just posted on Streaming Media, the lead says it all. Let me be up front about this. Vidizmo EnterpriseTube is the first corporate YouTube product that I’ve reviewed. So if you’re looking for a comparative analysis detailing how the product stacks up with other options, this, unfortunately, isn’t it. On the other …

Suppose you’re tasked with producing a high-profile live event. Perhaps the location has Ethernet connectivity, but you also want a redundant connection in case the Ethernet goes down. Or perhaps the location doesn’t offer Ethernet. What are your options?  That was the pitch for my article, Video for the Long Haul: Exploring Backhaul Options, which recently went live on the …

You can financially justify the expenses surrounding webcasting in multiple ways. First, streaming media can provide a cheaper alternative to an existing practice. Second, it can open new revenue opportunities. Finally, it can allow you to extend your marketing reach beyond what was available using traditional technologies. This article, entitled The ROI of Enterprise Webcasting: Justifying the Expense, presents  six …

My latest column in Streaming Media Magazine; Here’s the lead.  There’s a lot of interest in ultra-high definition (UHD) video, and the two codecs that drive it, HEVC and VP9. Over the past few months, a new UHD codec called Daala has also come to the fore. I wanted to take this opportunity to update the status of HEVC and …