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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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. …

On one level, Amazon’s Elastic Transcoder is a finely-tuned service well crafted for the largest sweet spot of the cloud encoding market, Plain Jane H.264 transcoding. On another level, its a service that aimed low from an interface and usability standpoint, and clearly hit its mark. I’m used to the public side of the Amazon house, which is always top …