Larry Kless' Weblog: Adobe

Showing posts with label Adobe. Show all posts

Friday, November 11, 2011

Jan Ozer's Thoughts on Why Adobe Abandoned Flash for Mobile

Streaming Media West was abuzz this past week with Adobe's surprising announcement that it will abandon future development of Flash Player for mobile devices following the next release 11.1, and will be more aggressively contribute to HTML5 innovation with key players, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM. Adobe will continue to support its current Flash development. Over the last few years HTML5 and H.264 video have been gaining momentum as an emerging standard for online and mobile video, spurred on by Apple's exclusion of Flash on its popular iDevices and negative press it received from Steve Jobs' Thoughts on Flash. Adobe had developed Flash Player to run on Google's Android and other non-Apple mobile platforms, but its official statement from its blog post now says,"HTML5 is the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms."

While Adobe had a strong presence at Streaming Media West with its Platinum sponsorship of the conference, prominent spot on the exhibit floor and usual pre-conference session with Kevin Towes, the company was tight lipped about why it decided to withdraw Flash from the mobile market. I caught up with Jan Ozer, Video Producer, Writer, Publisher of StreamingLearningCenter.com and author of Video Compression for Flash, Apple Devices and HTML5, to get his perspective on the implications of the announcement for the online video industry, mobile developers and consumers.

Ozer says Adobe made this move for three reasons. Number one, they were fighting against the current at least with Apple, and then with Microsoft's recent announcement about their tablet oriented operating system, they can't fight this. Number two, Ozer says, Adobe wasn't getting then support it needed from Google and other vendors to make Flash work effectively on mobile platforms. The last thing he says is, as computers get more powerful people are building applications that require more power and faster CPUs to run smoothly, and Flash-enabled tablets and phones simply don't have the power to run smoothly and deliver a quality experience.

This doesn't mean that Flash on the desktop is going away anytime soon, and Ozer says that it will actually create a tale of two websites, with a web version that is completely immersive Flash experience, and the other more simple and targeted for mobile devices.

"That's already being done by some vendors like Converse, who, if you visit it with an iPad, sends you to a simple e-commerce site, but if you visit with a computer, sends you to an immersive Flash experience. The other is that many vendors, seeking to minimize development costs, will produce a single site using HTML5 that lacks much of the immersion that Flash can provide."

While many are saying Adobe's announcement is significant, Ozer points out:

"In terms of video, remember that HTML5 doesn't have many key technologies now being used or implemented by the primary distributers of non-UGC video on the web (networks, studios, etc). These include adaptive streaming, digital rights management (DRM), peer-to-peer delivery, and in the enterprise space, multi-casting. Remember also that at last count (November 9, 2011), the penetration of HTML5 compatible browsers on connected computers was under 60%. Streaming producers are going to need a plug-in based option for several more years, and Flash is the obvious choice. "

He described the implications in greater detail on in this blog post, Adobe to Discontinue Flash for Mobile, and offered this advise to online video publishers.

"If you're a web producer trying to access these mobile devices, your strategy doesn't change much either. You've had to deliver to desktops with one technology and iDevices with another, Android has always been a fractured market. Now you'll likely deliver to all mobiles using a single technology (let's hope) and all desktops with another. Certainly Google's adaption of HTTP Live Streaming in Android 3.0 is a good sign."

Kaltura Secures $20 Million Investment to Further Disrupt the Online Video Space

This week Kaltura announced that it has secured $20 million in new financing led by new investors Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from Intel Capital and existing investors .406 Ventures and Avalon Ventures, and technology lender Silicon Valley Bankers. The open source online video platform has been on a steady growth path over the last 18 months and boasts over 100,000 publishers in a variety of markets and verticals in media and entertainment, enterprise, education and service providers. Kaltura offers a SaaS solution, a complete self-hosted solution and a free community edition of its open source video platform.

I caught up with Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura's CEO and Chairman, at NewTeeVee Live in November 2010, where he initially announced the C round funding with details to follow. We discussed Kaltura's 2010 year-end review, which for Kaltura was a phenomenal year of growth with 80,000 downloads of its code in 2010 alone, which he said is 60 times all the other industry combined. Part of that growth is measured with Kaltura's Community Edition, first released in 2009 at OSCON Open Source Convention as a completely free and fully functional self-hosted version its video management platform. Yekutiel said that with implementations in web management systems like Drupal, Joomla or Wordpress and learning management systems Moodle, Sakai or Blackboard Kaltura's platform is not just one application, but a myriad of applications, all of which have different parts of Kaltura connected into them.

When I spoke with Yekutiel earlier in the year at Streaming Media East 2010, he emphasized that Kaltura's two key differentiators are flexibility and control for online video publishers, with full control of Flash, Silverlight and HTML5 video content, and the flexible new Kaltura Exchange which fosters third-party development for their open source video platform. For Kaltura, this is how it sets itself apart from the rest of the OVP market.

In terms of Kaltura's growing customer base, Yekutiel noted many big name companies like Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount Pictures, HBO, NBA and a long list of others have become customers and are consuming not only licensed software but also development, maintenance and support. Kaltura also saw customer gains in the enterprise with Bank of America, Texas Instruments, Coldwell Banker, Best Buy, Siemens and in the education space, there's been a "landslide" of universities joining, with Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, NYU, Columbia University and all the Ivy League schools but Brown University, which they are working on.

Yekutiel said that a lot more service providers that have their own cloud and want to offer solutions are joining Kaltura as resellers of its OVP. An example he gave is Sport One in Europe, a large sports channel that many of the OVPs had bid on, but lost out to a local hosting provider that bundles and resells Kaltura's offerings. While Sport One didn't choose Kaltura directly, they became a customer through the local reseller, which Yekutiel referred to as small "Kaltura Mini-me's" that become OVPs in the local markets, and are really disrupting the industry.

Other key highlights for Kaltura in 2010 included, a number of new features and capabilities, in response to the latest developments within the online video ecosystem, such as HTML5 video playback. This led to big news with Adobe's announcement last October of its HTML5 video player widget based on Kaltura's HTML5 Media Library – already in use by Wikipedia – that works in all major browsers and includes a full set of HTML5 video tools – video and audio players, uploader and editor.

Yekutiel said Adobe's adoption of Kaltura's open source code creates great opportunities for the industry:

"This was a very historical release saying that Adobe's not anymore just about Flash, but also about HTML5 and after serving the whole industry and choosing if they could build their who le thing from scratch, they actual decided to adopt our code and offer it to everybody as the Adobe code. Which speaks volume on our ability to provide best of breed solutions."

Kaltura has been an early supporter of HTML5 video and earlier in the year, and with the Open Video Alliance and other partners, launched two new websites – Let’s Get Video on Wikipedia and HTML5video.org, an industry resource for all things HTML5 video-related, including news, technology demos as part of a mass campaign to bring video to Wikipedia.

"This is one small example of a bigger trend, that is, people understand the benefit of an open source solution. Not only being inclusive of all the innovation that's happening out there, but being able to rope in the power of the crowds and the wisdom of of thousands of people that are developing on top of our system. And I'm proud to say that we started off the year with maybe a few hundred developers that helped us externally, and today we have more then 6000 developers in the community that are building. So the pace of innovation is second to none."

Yekutiel noted that in regards to the $20 million C round investment, the new investors symbolized the power his company has as an open source vendor. Naren Gupta from Nexus Venture Partners called Kaltura, "a company that is hugely successful by combining the best technology with a powerful open source business model", and Maria Cirino of .406 Venture called Kaltura "a juggernaut" that is "led by a passionate group of world class entrepreneurs" and well positioned serve the exploding online video market.

Yekutiel believes Kaltura is disrupting the online video space "in a similar way to how open-source Red Hat™ and MySQL™ have disrupted their fields of operating systems and databases," and said the new investment will be used in the following way:

"To continue its momentum in the market and keep ahead of the curve, Kaltura is looking to further grow its team to increase development and professional services. We are also looking to expand into additional markets, including Europe, the Far East and India."

About Kaltura
Kaltura provides the world's first Open Source Online Video Platform. Over 100,000 media & entertainment companies, enterprises, SMBs, educational institutions, service providers, platform vendors, and system integrators use Kaltura's flexible platform to enhance their websites, web-services, and web-platforms with advanced customized video, photo and audio functionalities. Kaltura's features and products enable easy deployment of custom work-flows involving video creation, ingestion, publishing, management, syndication, engagement, monetization and analysis. The free community-supported self-hosted software and source-code is available for download at www.kaltura.org. A commercial version of the software can be obtained at www.kaltura.com along with Kaltura services such as streaming, hosting, transcoding, analytics, ad serving, support and maintenance packages, and professional development. Founded in 2006, New York based Kaltura is a founding member of the ‘Open Video Alliance' (www.openvideoalliance.org), a coalition of organizations dedicated to fostering open standards for online video. For more information: www.kaltura.com, www.kaltura.org and http://exchange.kaltura.com/. Follow @Kaltura and join the Facebook and LinkedIn groups.

Updated: 2/20/2011 Additional quote about what the money will be used for.

Sunday, August 29, 2010

¡Viva La H.264! MPEG LA Liberates H.264/AVC For All Free Video Content Forever... But What Does It All Mean??

The video codec format war heated up last week, with the announcement by the MPEG LA, that it has freed up the license of the H.264 AVC (Advanced Video Coding) codec, and will not charge royalties for any content that is free to consumers. The MPEG LA is the firm that manages the patent pool for AVC, and earlier this year, it announced it would not charge royalties for such video through December 31, 2015 (PDF link). But now and forever, it has made it free for the life of the license and will only charge for AVC encoded video content sold to end users in any form for a fee, on a title or subscription basis.

H.264/AVC video format is the digital video coding industry standard H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10, or AVC used widely in set-top boxes, media player and other personal computer software, mobile devices, Blu-ray Disc™ players and recorders, game machines, personal media player devices and still and video cameras. Apple has become most outspoken proponent of AVC, and backs it as the standard video codec used for its HTML-5 video compatible mobile iDevices like the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, as well as for iTunes videos, and Microsoft also announced support for H.264-encoded HTML5 video in IE9 earlier this year.

Many have speculated that the move by the MPEG LA was spurred on by Google's release of VP8 as an open source royalty free video codec, a new rival to H.264/AVC and potential replacement to the open source Theora. Google announced the release of the VP8 video codec under the WebM Project at the i/O developers conference in May, with broad industry support. Absent from the list of supporters was, of course, Apple.

The tug of war between these two competing video codecs has reached an inflection point according to Streamingmedia.com's Tim Siglin, who says:

"There is little doubt that the most recent announcement by MPEG LA is, in part, a counteraction against the potential inroads that WebM may make in the online video space."

The codec issue is a big dilemma for online video publishers says Jan Ozer. He recently authored a recent survey for StreamingMedia.com, Supporting the iPad and HTML5, and found that less Than 50% of publishers ready to implement HTML5 video,

According to Ozer:

"54% of respondents who were considering HTML5 support rated the lack of single codec either a serious concern, or a very serious concern. Lack of HTML5 browser penetration was rated even more of a concern, but that will resolve in time. The codec issue appears to be a permanent problem which will force producers to encode in as many as four or five different formats in the short term, and at least two in the long term."

Rounding out the analysis from Streaming Media is Dan Rayburn who acknowledged that while the MPEG LA's royalty free license is good news for content owners, it does not address the future market needs for subscription based content services and device manufactures who will continue to pay to license the codec.

Rayburn also agreed that the lack of a codec standard is a major sticking point for the industry:

"The news also does nothing to address what I consider to be a bigger issues which is the need for browsers to give us a single codec we can call use. Companies like Mozilla and Opera are still going to have to pay for a license if they want to support H.264 which means we are not any closer to have much in the way of video standard on the Internet."

As far as browsers go, they are waging their own war. Safari supports H.264, Firefox, Opera and Chrome support WebM, and IE9 will support both as well as its own VC-1. Mozilla has refused to support H.264 as a codec for the HTML5 video tag in Firefox, and it's unlikely it will in the future. Theora plays natively in FireFox 3.5, Chrome as of version 3.0.182.2 and Opera as version 10.50. All browsers can play H.264 encoded video presented in Adobe's Flash plug-in, but as everyone knows, Flash doesn't play within Apple's iOS on its iDevices. According to current global browser market share and trends of the five major browsers, IE 6.0-8.0 leads with 52.68%, followed by FireFox 3.0+-3.5+ with 31.49% and those numbers are growing steadily as people migrate to the newer versions. Chrome has grown to 9.80%, Safari has about 5.09% and Opera is 1.90%.

Ultimately, it's all not just about patents and licenses, there's a much bigger back story. I like this post by Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire, The Future of Web Content – HTML5, Flash & Mobile Apps, which provides a detailed industry analysis on the codec format and browser wars. He says video is a cornerstone issue and the emergence of the mobile device industry has brought the issue to the forefront:

"With massive growth in hand-held web browsing from smartphones, iTouch devices and the pending iPad product, this has raised a deeper issue for media publishers who are eager to have their content be accessible to end-users. In particular, it is the show-down between Apple, Google and Adobe over who can control video formats on these devices that is creating challenges. Again, this is not about “what is the right technical solution”, it is about the political economy of who controls the formats that in turn lead to owning downstream audience and monetization opportunities."

While many big video websites, like YouTube and Vimeo, have rolled out their own HTML5 video players, we are held at bay by the big browser developers that can't agree which video codec to support in HTML5. The MPEG LA's move has brought us closer to a standard - with the two dominant video codec standards AVC and WebM - the tug of war continues and we're caught in the struggle. Until there is broad support for all codecs and containers across the industry, we won't be reaching a web video standard anytime soon.

About MPEG LA, LLC

MPEG LA is the world leader in alternative technology licenses, enabling users to acquire worldwide patent rights necessary for a technology standard or platform from multiple patent owners in a single transaction as an alternative to negotiating individual licenses. MPEG LA’s initial licensing program for MPEG-2 digital video compression helped produce the most widely employed standard in consumer electronics history, and the MPEG LA® Licensing Model has become the template for addressing other technologies. Today MPEG LA manages licensing programs consisting of essential patents in 57 countries. MPEG LA is an independent licensing administrator; it is not related to any standards agency and is not an affiliate of any patent holder. For more information, please refer to http://www.mpegla.com.

Related:
To Infinity and Beyond: MPEG LA Extends H.264 Internet Video Moratorium Indefinitely - StreamingMedia.com

MPEG-LA Announces No royalties on Free Internet Videos - Ever

iPad and HTML5 Adoption - Supporting the iPad and HTML5

Larry Kless' Weblog: Google Releases VP8 as Open Source Royalty Free Video Codec, Launches WebMproject.org with Broad Support from Online Video Industry

Analysis: Royalty-free H.264 may clear way for HTML5 video standard | Browsers | iOS Central | Macworld

Related WebM reading:
What Does the Webmproject Mean for the Future of Video on the Web

VP8, WebM, and HTML5 video « Zencoder Blog

Diary Of An x264 Developer » The first in-depth technical analysis of VP8

Thursday, April 1, 2010

The iPad Cometh - The Online Video Industry Gears Up for the Launch

Over the last several months HTML5 and H.264 video have been gaining momentum as an emerging standard for online video, spurred on by the announcement earlier this year of Apple's new iPad. The device will be available to those who pre-ordered early later this week on April 3rd, and new orders will ship in two weeks. It has been touted by Apple as the future model for online publishers, even though like its predecessors the iPod touch and iPhone, it doesn't support Flash. Apple pre-sold 120,000 units on the first day, with 51,000 of them purchased in the first two hours on sale, and analysts predict that 10 million will be sold in 2010.

There has been a great deal of discussion on why Apple chose to exclude Flash, which has been the dominant format for video on the web with Flash Video having approximately 75% market-share for online video. But according to Steve Jobs, Flash is a "CPU Hog" that would drain the iPad's battery and it's "full of security holes". In speaking with the Wall Street Journal he reportedly said, "We don't spend a lot of energy on old technology," and suggested the WSJ to abandon Flash for the H.264 codec.

Jan Ozer though recently disputed the "CPU Hog" comment, and ran a series of tests and found that Flash actually was not a CPU Hog. He noted that Apple blocks Flash from accessing hardware acceleration which helps with efficient video playback. Fair or not, the turf wars wage on with all the big players Apple, Google, Adobe and Microsoft taking sides and looking to expand their market-share. See Tim Siglin's post, Commentary: Working Around the Web, where he provides some great commentary on Apple's "pure HTML" approach vs. Adobe "standards-based" plug-in approach. While Flash is not going away for the foreseeable future, up and down the stack the online video industry is adapting to HTML5 as an emerging standard, and the opportunity that the iPad brings, with a number of announcements made in the last few days.

Brightcove unveiled its new Brightcove Experience for HTML5 -- a framework for publishing and delivering interactive and advertising-supported Web video for HTML5-compatible devices. The platform is available free to Brightcove's more than 1,000 customers and provides support for intelligent device detection, playlist rendering, and transcoding and playback of H.264 video content from Adobe Flash video, analytics tracking, social sharing controls, advertising insertion, and other capabilities. Customers who are using Brightcove's HTML5 solution include Time Inc. and the New York Times (a Brightcove investor).Brightcove says it's platform agnostic and has been supporting HTML5 and H.264 since 2008.

Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove chairman and chief executive officer said:

"The Brightcove Experience for HTML5 fills the gap between the current playback capabilities of the emerging standard and what our customers need to operate successful online video businesses."

A few days prior, Brightcove rival Ooyala announced that it will support full video delivery to iPad when it launches on April 3rd. For over a year, Ooyala has had iPhone support in the form of an intelligent video embed lets the Ooyala player automatically recognize each device and adjust video quality and format for the best possible viewing experience.

According to Bismarck Lepe, President of Product:

"The iPad is more than just another connected device. It's an innovation that will drive new ideas in portability and personalized media."

Kyte announced an iPad SDK and HTML5 support for developing Kyte-powered iPad apps for distribution through the Apple iTunes App Store, as well as web-based support for the iPad through a new, universal embed code that outputs HTML5 video. The new SDK and HTML5 support provides customers with the flexibility and choice to build native iPad applications, or extend compatibility of their new or existing Kyte-powered websites to the iPad.

Gannon Hall, COO, Kyte said:

"Representing the next phase in media delivery and Internet connected devices, the iPad is a platform every video publisher needs to plan for," "Kyte has long been focused on delivering innovative, forward looking functionality that gives video publishers the ability to reach and engage audiences no matter where they are. Our support for HTML5 and our release of an SDK for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch is the next step in this progression."

Like Ooyala and Kyte, Delve Networks announced that it too will support full video delivery to iPad when the tablet device launches. Customers will be able to content for their iPad readers using the same easy-to-use Delve video platform where they currently manage their website videos.

Encoding.com, one of the companies in particular best suited to cash-in on the need for HTML5 video transcoding services. today announced support for HTTP Live Streaming for Apple's iPhone, iPod touch, and the soon to be released iPad mobile devices. HTTP streaming enables publishers to provide users with a better video experience by continuously adapting the video stream in real-time to match the user's available bandwidth.

Encoding.com President Jeff Malkin told FierceOnlineVideo:

"The Codec format war that's been brewing between apple, Google, and Flash and all of that together has created a perfect storm for a business like ours where we're automating a very complex process and taking it off the plates of our clients. We're making it simple for our customers and, timing-wise, our new service couldn't be better situated

Limelight Networks announced it will support rich media content delivery to the iPad on day one of the product availability. Customers of the Limelight REACH and Limelight ADS services will automatically have their mobile distribution and monetization services updated for the new device, enabling them to present a brilliant and properly formatted media experience to purchasers of the widely anticipated tablet.

"We will be formatting content for the best playback experience on those shiny new Apple toys. And the best part? We’re not reinventing the wheel here or coming up with a new application just for the iPad launch. Our existing technology and infrastructure is specifically designed to adapt content for delivery to any new devices that pop up. Our targeted delivery profiles change, but the process stays the same. Which means we’ve got you covered not only for the Apple iPad, but also for whatever product launch event comes next." - Apple iPad – We’ve Got You Covered, The Limelight blog

Rounding out the announcements is MeFeedia with its HTML5 video pre-roll solution. Currenty, the All Player™ platform powers over 50 million monthly video ads across web and mobile devices (including where flash is not supported) and can show video ads to any browser that supports HTML5 natively.

Look for more announcements in the days to come as well as more on the format wars. In particular, the tensions have also been building between Apple and Google, and Google fired back the other day with the announcement that their Chrome browser will ship with an integrated Flash Player plug-in.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Brightcove To Power Mobile Video Explosion, Announces Mobile Experience for Flash Player 10.1

Brightcove has upped the ante again, announcing support for the upcoming release of Adobe's Flash Player 10.1 with its Mobile Experience for Flash 10.1, an optimized mobile version of the company’s cloud-based online video platform. Introduced today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the move helps Brightcove's customers extend the reach of their video content to a range of mobile smartphone platforms that will run the forthcoming Flash Player 10.1, including Google Android, Symbian S60, Palm webOS, Windows Mobile and Research in Motion BlackBerry. Brightcove's implementation brings all the features and services of its platform - analytics, in video advertising, secure multi-bitrate streaming, and the more than 120 plugins available for the Brightcove platform, to these mobile phones for the first time.

The announcement builds on Brightcove's strategic alliance with Adobe, who officially announced Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR for Android at the Mobile World Congress today. Adobe had previously made a beta of Flash Player 10.1 available to content providers and mobile developers worldwide. Flash Player 10.1 makes it possible for mobile platforms to run the standard Brightcove video player with the same features as desktop platforms. Jeff Whatcott, Senior vice president of Marketing, Brightcove said in an Adobe press release:

“We’re excited to extend Brightcove’s leading online video platform with support for Adobe Flash Player 10.1 and the new Brightcove Mobile Experience solution. Brightcove’s global customer base of more than 1,000 media companies and marketers now have a unified platform and turnkey solution for providing a high-quality, consistent online video experience across PCs and mobile devices.”

In this Beet.TV video, Jeff describes the capabilities and features of their new mobile optimized media player.

Brightcove customers already using the beta version of Brightcove's Mobile Experience for Flash 10.1 include AOL, Atlantic Records, La Vanguardia, National Geographic, The New York Times, STV, Sun Media and The Weinstein Company. The solution is available today in an invitation-only beta release and will be generally available later this year and provided free of charge to Brightcove's global customer base.

You can also watch the demo video below to see the solution in action.

The Brightcove solution implements three main features:

Mobile player optimized templates - offering interface controls, gestures, and behaviors specifically designed for video viewing on compact, multi-touch smart phone screen. This allows for a seamless viewing experience and navigation on the small screen.
Automatic device detection - helps deliver the right template to the right device for optimum playback environment between desktop and mobile player templates, along with video embedding best practices to assist organizations in delivering mobile video-ready websites.
Cloud-based transcoding - H.264-encoded mobile ready video from any standard format source file.

According to a Strategy Analytics analysis from January 2010, more than 250 million smartphones are expected to support the full Flash Player by the end 2012. It's no surprise that the iPhone is missing from the list of supported mobile devices, since the iPhone and iPad don't support Flash. Brightcove has an iPhone SDK and with the open API, customers can write code for a HTML5 H.24 video player. Jeff Whattcott said that Brightcove is looking to make this easier for publishers in the future.

To learn more about the Brightcove Mobile Experience solution for Adobe Flash Player 10.1, read the full press release here or visit http://www.brightcove.com/en/video-platform/solutions/mobile-experience/flash-player

Ooyala Goes Live, Releases Live Streaming With Real-Time Analytics

In response to the growing demand of online video publishers to incorporate the power of live streaming into their offerings, Ooyala has released Live Streaming with Real-time Analytics as a native feature of their Backlot publishing platform. This new functionality is immediately available to customers with Studio accounts (an add on for Director accounts) and offers a quick and easy way to set up a live stream from the same console that they manage their on-demand content. Customers like Electronic Arts, the AVP, Arsenal and Planet Streams Ltd. are already using the service.

All the same features within Backlot used to manage video on-demand content, such as advanced syndication controls, player branding, video search, analytics, adaptive bit-rate and monetization are all supported by the new live streaming offering. Ooyala is using Adobe Flash Media Server (FMS) 3.5 to capture and encode the live streams and Akamai Technologies Inc. for content delivery. Ryan Lawler noted on Contentinople, that Ooyala went exclusive with Akamai months ago migrating the vast majority of its video delivery to the CDN for better overall performance.

While it's not available right now, Ooyala will be rolling out adaptive bit-rate streaming or dynamic streaming in the coming weeks, a key feature of Adobe FMS 3.5 for managing the live streaming user experience. Akamai announced support dynamic streaming and other key enhancements to its Flash streaming capabilities earlier this year. Dynamic streaming is a new feature in Adobe FMS 3.5 that seamlessly switches between different quality versions of a single video stream based on available bandwidth to deliver the optimal viewing experience.

According to Ooyala, you don't need a budget in the tens of millions of dollars to go live and this new offering gives publishers the same tools as that of big media companies. Pricing for the service will be at the same cost as the on-demand content packages.

This is the second launch for the company this week and follows the recent announcement that their platform is powering automobile video reviews (provided by WheelsTV) on the eBay Motors website and is great example of online video for eCommerce. Ooyala expects to make several more exciting company, customer and product announcements before year's end.

Next month at the Online Video Platform Summit, Ooyala will be showcasing their technology as part of the Online Video Platform Showcase and Bismarck Lepe, Co-founder and President of Product & Marketing, will be a featured speaker on the opening panel session, Defining Online Video Platforms. Additionally, Streaming Media West will feature a panel session on, Understanding Adaptive Bitrate Technology and HTTP Video Delivery, which will explore how this technology is impacting platform providers and content owners, their content offerings and plans and real impact to their users. Finally, you can also read Jan Ozer's article, Streaming Gets Smarter: Evaluating the Adaptive Streaming Technologies.

About Ooyala Inc.

Ooyala is a video technology company that provides a comprehensive software platform enabling the delivery, management, and monetization of high quality online video content. Its innovative analytics engine and monetization server allow video content owners to drive revenue by maximizing the value of their content. Ooyala has over 500 customers, including 150 global media and enterprise customers such as Warner Brothers, Wenner Media, Fremantle, Armani, Sybase and Electronic Arts.

For more information visit www.ooyala.com.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Adobe Scores with MLB, Silverlight Strikes Out

Yesterday in a stunning defeat, the Adobe® Flash® Platform beat out Microsoft's Silverlight as the video delivery platform for MLB.com. Major League Baseball Advanced Media, MLBAM, is dropping Silverlight after one year in favor of Flash which MLBA's president and CEO Bob Bowman said better suits its needs. Under a two-year agreement the Adonbe's Flash Platform will deliver all of MLB.com's live and on-demand video offerings beginning in 2009. MLB.com has signed up more than 1.5 million subscribers since 2003 and streams more than 2,500 regular and postseason games annually.

Bowman said "our experience with Silverlight has led us to where we are.. We did it because we serve up more live video than anybody "Flash provides a TV-like experience, you turn it on and it works... We want it to be flexible so we can add features...and it’s got to be scaleable. We are the largest server of live entertainment int he country. Whether we are serving 20,000 for one game or 250,000 for another game it’s got to be scaleable over periods of time like nothing else.”

Read the full press release here.

Baseball is not the only sport that has drafted Flash as a delivery platform as it was just in September that the NFL selected Flash for streaming of football games on NBCSports and NFL.com. Many tech blogs implied that NBC "dropped", "dumped" or "ditched" Silverlight in favor of Flash and it was Dan Rayburn who set the record straight saying, NBC Did Not "Drop" Silverlight In Favor Of Flash: Bloggers Simply Want Headlines | The Business Of Online Video.

Ben Homer of Online Video Watch noted,"While the battle rages on, Flash has 98% penetration versus Silverlight’s 25% Microsoft continues to have a rough time convincing media companies to get on board with Silverlight without paying them to do so. Instead of releasing a new product in Silverlight that does more than Flash Microsoft is still trying to play catchup, and they’re falling further and further behind."

The Flash/MLB.com partnership was announced this week in San Francisco at the Adobe Max developers conference which kicked off with other major announcements in the latest Flash technology developments.

Among them were:

There was also a lot of buzz about Adobe opening up its cloud initiative, known as “Cocomo,” as a public beta which allows developers easily add real-time social capabilities into their RIA. Read more about Cocomo here.

Related:

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Weekly Review: Meet the New Online Video Players - Brightcove 3, Flash Player 10, Joost and Silverlight 2

I had started each of these news items as separate posts last week but I combined them all into this single post as weekly review. We all know the financial situation has put start-ups on shaky ground with a number of them already closing their doors. But the online video world continues to innovate and invest in new technologies for content creation, delivery, syndication and distribution. New online video players were introduced almost every day last week by the major players in the industry. Here's a sort list run down of the significant announcements from the previous week.

On Monday, October 13th Brightcove introduced Brightcove 3, their new online video publishing platform. Andy Plesser shared this video on Beet.TV of Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove Chairman and CEO, who demonstrates the new platform. Andy wrote, "For this interview, we have published the video in the new Brightcove 3 environment. Check out full screen to see how well the player works. It uses a new kind of dynamic delivery which adjusts the bitrate to the viewers' bandwidth." - from Beet.TV: Brightcove Unveils New Video Pubishing Platform with New Service...for Large and Small Video Publishers

"Video has gone from being a consumer-driven entertainment experience on the Web to being a basic feature of any professional website across all media and corporate sectors," said Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove chairman and chief executive officer. "While online video is becoming ubiquitous, one size does not fit all. Built as an extensible SaaS application, Brightcove 3 provides tremendous flexibility to online publishers to meet the needs of the full spectrum of different end-user scenarios." - from Brightcove 3 Transforms the Business of Online Video Brightcove Press Releases

What's significant in the Brightcove 3 release is a scaled offering and tiered pricing structure for small and medium-sized companies, something they've have been criticized for which has been a barrier for by the smaller enterprise customers.

Mark Robertson has a detailed report that outlines the new areas of functionality along with with customer experiences at: Brightcove 3 Online Video Publishing Platform for Media | Reel SEO

More reading:

On Tuesday, October 14, Microsoft made Silverlight 2 available for download to the public and for those who have been using it believe it contains vast improvements. As a competitor to Adobe's Flash Player it's received good press for it's updated interactive functions and customizable interface for big events like the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the Democratic National Convention.

The October 13 press release included some interesting statistics, "Silverlight adoption continues to grow rapidly, with penetration in some countries approaching 50 percent and a growing ecosystem that includes more than 150 partners and tens of thousands of applications. During the 17 days of the 2008 Olympics Games in Beijing, NBCOlympics.com, powered by Silverlight, had more than 50 million unique visitors, resulting in 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams and 600 million minutes of video watched, increasing the average time on the site (from 3 minutes to 27 minutes) and Silverlight market penetration in the U.S. by more than 30 percent. Broadcasters in France (France Televisions SA), the Netherlands (NOS), Russia (Sportbox.ru) and Italy (RAI) also chose Silverlight to deliver Olympics coverage online."

It was an automatic update for clients who already had Silverlight 1 installed and one of teh key advantages is cross browser support of Microsofts .NET Framework for Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and you can read more on the highlights here along with a technology preview of the Soyatec project, an open source RIA development environment at: http://www.eclipse4sl.org.

Microsoft had recently made headlines last month with the announcements at IBC which included playback of H.264 video and its equity stake in Move Networks.

This video from Streaming Media West features Eric Schmidt, Director of Silverlight Media Evangelism, Microsoft who presents "how Silverlight enables a host of engaging in-stream and rich media advertising scenarios, allowing advertisers to create compelling, best-of-breed brand experiences on the web." You can also download the presentation Integrating Advertising With Microsoft Silverlight.

Monday, May 26, 2008

Streaming Media East Interviews: Kevin Towes on Flash Player 10

This rounds out a week of coverage on Streaming Media East. Many news stories have been posted and the videos from the conference sessions are starting to be available. Andy Plesser of Beet.TV was on the conference floor doing a live 2-hour broadcast that featured a number of shakers and movers in the online video publishing industry.

Kevin Towes from Adobe was on hand to discuss the latest release of Flash Player 10 of which Hank Williams of Why Does Everything Suck.com says will change the economics of internet in his post Adobe Introduces P2P Flash Player, Kills CDNs.

About this video, Williams says, "While Andy interprets Kevin's answer as being a refutation of what I said, it is clearly not. Kevin actually doesn't give a direct answer. He says "Hank makes some gross assumptions in all his diligence, its sort of interesting. But what we announced is something called RTMFP." But what he does not say is, "you will not be able to make a p2p network with Flash." Also, neither has the Flash Player Product Manager Justin Everett-Church been categorical about it here or here." - Hank Williams, Why does everything suck? May 21, 2008

Hank Williams has several follow up posts:

Andy Plesser also recommended this related post P2P in Flash 10 Beta — the Questions Facing a YouTube, Skype, and BitTorrent Killer by Adam Fisk as well as this one Flash P2P: Now That’s Disruptive by Om Malik.

UPDATE: You can also Kevin Towes' blog Flash Media here.
UPDATE 2: Another good related post: Adobe Flash Player Now With Built-In Peer To Peer Capabilities | Flash 10 Has Arrived » Web TV Wire

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Beet.TV: More on H.264 with Adobe's Kevin Towes

Andy Plesser posted this follow up interview with Kevin Towes from Adobe who goes into more detail about H.264 and the difference between high quality and high definition video. Towes describes container formats like .flv, .rm and .wmv as "end of the line" formats because that's all you can use them for since they are encoded to their proprietary formats. H.264 is more of a universal format that can delivered in both Quicktime and Flash formats which offers a greater ROI on your transcoding.

How do you deliver a HD experience through broadband? 1080p demands 15 Mbps and the web can't sustain that level of streaming. Towes says that we need to develop a "Web HD Concept" that can emulate a HD viewing experience but not deliver a true HD signal. You could have widescreen video, a certain frame size with a variable bit rate to achieve high quality with H.264.

The fact is that H.264 video looks great, it's scalable, standards based and can easily be delivered in a variety of formats. It's been several years in the making to reach its current state of adoption and could be widespread throughout the online video ecosystem by the end of the year. From digital device, to digital television and Blu-Ray disc you'll start seeing it more and more.

Kevin Towes' interview continues as he describes that file size is based on frame size, frame rate and but rate and how it can be estimated.

- Videos courtesy of Beet.TV

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Adobe Media Player is Here - RSS feeds and Offline Viewing Now Available

Adobe Media Player is finally here and it sets a new standard for the delivery of video content in a rich media experience for both online and offline viewing. I just read posts by Dan Rayburn, Andy Plesser and Duncan Reily who have all reported that it's official and now available for public download. So without hesitation I raced over to Adobe and downloaded it myself to get the party started. I've already set up a few subscriptions including Beet.TV, The GigaOm Show and The Digg Reel just to name a few but there's plenty more to choose from including the Twilight Zone channel or Yo' MTV Raps.

Silicon Alley Insider reported a few days ago that Adobe Media Player (AMP) would be released to the public this week and it would offer many new features. In the report Michael Learmonth explained that Adobe Media Player is different from other players by offering playback of high quality MPEG-4 content and unlike other players like Joost or Blinkx, also Adobe will not have to deal with big bandwidth costs since the content is downloaded and played back locally but will see only a small cut in advertising revenue since most of that will go to content owners, and the new player will most likely be widely adopted with since people are accustomed to Flash Player downloads and will see AMP as an upgrade option.

A pre-release version of AMP had already available at Adobe Labs and had been used to test user experience and for content owners to test the RSS feeds. The new player is based on Adode Air which enables content to be viewed on-line and off-line. With AMP you'll be able to add your own RSS feeds to get automatic content downloads. You'll also be able to play .flv files outside of the browser, something you haven't been able to do before with out the aid of another player.

Andy Plesser notes, "Unlike iTunes, which provides little opportunities for video producers to monetize through advertising, the AMP platform is highly customizable. AMP supports banner advertising and all sorts of in-stream media. (Implementation is not that simple and requires some coding skills.)"

In his post, "Hold the Presses: Adobe Enters the Media Business: Advertising Sales as Software Services", Plesser describes how AMP's advertising model works and that he's proud to have Beet.TV be part of the launch. He included an interview with Adobe's Laurel Reitman who discusses the rich media experience , file formats and servers.

Dan Rayburn explains, "One of the biggest things that Adobe is promoting about the new player is the ability for you to be able search within the player for free content you can to subscribe to and the new features for monetization and branding options. Content owners now have the ability to take downloadable Flash content and include offline advertising, customize the look of the player and collect measurement data of offline content consumption."

Two video interviews with Ashley Still, Adobe Sr. Product manager that are featured below. One is from Webware.com by Rafe Needleman who says, "I see AMP as a competitor to Hulu (related stories), although Adobe's Ashley Manning Still, who demonstrated the product for me, considers Hulu--an online-only Flash-based player--as complementary or perhaps a partner. But since both AMP and Hulu are competing for the same advertising revenues, I'd say that puts them at odds."

Ashley Still contended that Hulu is big partner with Adobe while Joost is a competitor and that Adobe is an enabling technology provider and will be adding more content partners in the future.

Robert Scoble also interviewed Ashley Still in this Qik video who says for content owners it's a compelling way to redistribute content and Adobe is looking at this as a big distribution platform. It will have free subscriptions to shows and along with different pricing structures to purchase content. There is a SDK that will be available but no APIs as of yet but you'll be able to brand your player. Different resolutions will be supported from SD to HD video all the way up to 1080p. It will work on Mac and Windows and Linux soon.

Adobe also debuts Adobe TV which Duncan Reily notes, "Adobe TV is available at tv.adobe.com or as a network in Adobe Media Player and offers “expert instruction and original series programming” about Adobe products. Adobe TV offers four channels targeted at Photographers, Designers, Video Professionals, and Developers. Content comes from “Adobe evangelists, leading trainers, subject matter experts, and luminaries.” Over 200 videos are available for the launch."

Related:

Yet Another Video Service, Adobe Edition - from Silicon Alley Insider by Michael Learmonth - April 7, 2008
Get ready for Adobe Media Player (updated with video demo) - from Webware.com by Rafe Needleman – April 4, 2008
Adobe's new video player Pre-Announcement - by Scobleizer on April 07, 2008
Adobe Wants to Be a Player - from Businessweek by Cliff Edwards - April 3, 2008
NAB 2007: Major Announcements from Microsoft and Adobe Shake Up the World of Online Video - from Streamingmedia.com by Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen - April 16, 2007

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