January, 2014

• 27 January

  Wistia: An OVP that Specializes in Video Marketing

  Over the last three or four years, the big OVPs–Brightcove, Kaltura and Ooyala–got bigger, and the smaller ones seemed to go away. While some consolidation and/or attrition is expected in every growing market, in the OVP space it felt like there were the haves, and that’s it. Last year, around this time, I become aware of a small OVP named …

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• 22 January

  While DASH Languishes, HLS Becomes More Useful and Accessible

  Yesterday I announced a webinar titled Adaptive Streaming to Desktops and Mobile via HTTP Live Streaming (HLS): A Simple Approach; No Coding Required (more info here), which is scheduled for Tuesday, January 28th, at 2:00 PM EST. Here’s the back story on why, and why you might be interested in attending.   It’s pretty much accepted that adaptive streaming is …

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• 17 January

  MPEG LA Announces Proposed HEVC Licensing Terms

  Yesterday, MPEG LA announced proposed license terms for HEVC. We parsed the press release, and spoke with MPEG LA, and here’s what we know, and what we don’t know.

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• 16 January

  MPEG LA Announces HEVC Licensing; Annual Max Royalty Quadruples to $25M

  Just got the press release; No content royalties (H.264 had them for subscriptions and PPV) and max annual royalty quadrupled (more or less) from $6.5 million to $25 million to start. Here’s the pasted bit from the press release: full release attached below. Decoder-Encoder Manufacturer Sublicenses • HEVC products sold by a legal entity to end users   o 0 – …

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• 15 January

  Wirecast Frame Rate Too Slow? Check Video Display Rate

  If your capture frame rate in Wirecast drops into the 10-15 fps range, check the Video Display Rate option in the Preferences dialog. When I started testing this morning after several weeks away from the program, it was set at 60. Unfortunately, that produced capture rates in the 12-15 range, not sufficient for the testing I was doing. Took me …

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• 15 January

  Netflix Commits to HEVC for House of Cards

  Multiple websites have reported that Netflix intends to use HEVC to distribute House of Cards in 4K. Even more significantly, they intend to reencode much of their SD and HD content to HEVC to save bandwidth costs and deliver higher quality video over existing connections. This is a significant win for HEVC, and will likely accelerate adoption by the content …

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• 12 January

  Video: Applying Lumetri Looks and other Effects Directly in Adobe Media Encoder

  Not quite sure when Adobe added these features, but I was puttering around in Adobe Media Encoder CC last week and noticed that Adobe added the ability to add Lumetri looks, text, graphics and timecode directly in Adobe Media Encoder (AME). In previous versions, you would have had to use Premiere Pro. If you’re working with content you didn’t edit …

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• 10 January

  The Dirty Little Secret About 4K: Content Owners Can’t Afford It

  My colleague Dan Rayburn at Streaming Media (also a Frost & Sullivan analyst) just released another of his market-defining blog posts, entitled “The Dirty Little Secret About 4K Streaming: Content Owners Can’t Afford The Bandwidth Costs.” As the title suggests, after speaking with content producers before and during CES, Rayburn that few video distributors other than subscription services can afford …

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• 9 January

  Cracking the Code of x264 Presets

  Like most compression geeks, I’m a big fan of the x264 codec, which is widely considered the highest quality H.264 codec, winning the prestigious University of Moscow codec shootout year after year. Though the codec has a comprehensive range of configuration options, I recommend that most users simply choose a preset and let it go at that-no tinkering required (as …

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• 7 January

  YouTube/VP9/4K – Get Off the Dime, MPEG-LA

  When YouTube sneezes, the codec world catches the ‘flu, even if the cause of the sneeze was totally innocuous. So it was with YouTube’s announcement that they will show 4K video encoded with VP9 at CES with hardware partners including Sony, Intel and many others. From the coverage in the press, which extended all the way to CNN, you would …

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