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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.”
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.
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.
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.
"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 RobertsoncloseAuthor: Mark RobertsonName: Mark Robertson Email: mark@reelseo.com Site:http://www.reelseo.com/about/mark/ About: Mark Robertson is the creator and Publisher of ReelSEO.com. Mark has had extensive experience in online marketing, particularly in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Mark is Director of Search for Freedom Interactive Media and has worked with many newspaper and broadcast stations for optimization online content.See Authors Posts (850)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
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.
Also on October 14, Joost relaunched with a new Flash-based web browser interface with social tools to navigate through it's enormous library of videos and share with friends. The once dominant player in the online video market has fallen out of favor with stiff competition from Hulu, YouTube, Veoh, DailyMotion and many other sites. While Joost has about 46,000 assets or about 8,000 total hours of video it's unclear whether or not it can successfully compete in the crowded field.
There's been much skepticism like that of Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch who wrote, "The Flash site comes almost exactly a year after I wrote a post pointing out that Joost’s peer-to-peer software approach would not work and that it would have to switch over to Flash-based video, just like every other Web video service. People don’t want to have to launch a new piece of software to watch video on their computers. They want to watch it in their browsers... It took Joost a year, but it has finally realized that the Web is where it’s at." - from Joost Turns On Its All-Flash Website. Is Anybody Watching?
Also according to Pete Wylie, "Joost's player is a straight Hulu rip, no matter what anyone says. It may have one or two features that Hulu doesn't have, but it doesn't have the level of content or real community viewership to touch them there. It got off to a head start and now finds itself behind the game and running out of original ideas. Copying a winning idea after the original one failed is far from exciting or groundbreaking." - from Three new video players, but different results - FierceOnlineVideo
On Wednesday, October 15, Adobe released Flash Player 10, it's ubiquitous online video player for download. With new features and visual performance improvements like native 3D transformation, animation, advanced audio processing, custom filters and effect, advanced text layout and GPU hardware acceleration. The most notable improvement for online video is dynamic streaming which will automatically adjust bitrates of streaming media depending on changing network conditions. It also extends capabilities of its CS4 software suite and an upcoming release of Adobe Media Server will implement dynamic streaming. Read more detailed information in the release notes here.Additionally this update addresses security vulnerabilities.
This video from Mike Downey, Principal Evangelist for Platform Business Development at Adobe Systems was published in May 2008 when the first public Adobe Flash Player 10 "Astro" beta had just been released. This video gives a quick overview of some of the big new features.
Liz Gaines of NewTeeVee says, "Despite new competition from Microsoft’s Silverlight, Adobe appears to be adding to its market share. Some 86 percent of online videos viewed in the U.S. in August used Adobe Flash, according to comScore. That’s up from 66 percent in November 2007. Adobe attributes its own growth to the expanding market and to new deals with power sites LIKE? DirectTV, MySpace Music, Disney, and Sunday Night Football. Meanwhile, when you combine its Windows Media and Silverlight products, Microsoft has apparently lost market share. It had 24 percent U.S. market share last November and now has 13 percent." - from Adobe Adds Dynamic Streaming and More to Flash Player « NewTeeVee.
Streaming media author and encoding expert Jan Ozer posted a commentary on Streamingmedia.com yesterday on why Microsoft should consider adding H.264 playback to Silverlight and/or Windows Media player and drop the continued development of Microsoft's VC-1 video codec . He said that there was a major buzz about this at Streaming Media East and thought it made a lot of sense but it turned out to be only a rumor that Microsoft has adamantly denied.
Jan Ozer presents a compelling case on why Microsoft should adopt H.264 and offers the following:
In all his codec quality tests since 2006, VC-1 has rated last far below H.264 and on2's VP6 codec. You can look at some of the results in the presentation he gave at Streaming Media East available here. He also tested CPU utilization and found that at 720p the H.264 Baseline profile still out performed VC-1.
Having a single standard like H.264 within the mobile market will help it thrive best and help lower overall costs for video-enabled phones. As for streaming, he asked, "Since VC-1 will likely fail in the device market, why continue to push in streaming? All this does is force publishers seeking to stream to both computers and devices (like NBC and the upcoming Olympics) to encode using two different codecs, needlessly increasing production costs. Since video playback in the device market is currently scattered among H.264, Flash Lite, and WMV, supporting multiple codecs is necessary today, but should it be in the future?"
He says that Silverlight would also prosper by adding H.264 support and it would be a shame to lock it into a technology that doesn't even match the quality of the two Flash codecs. It's his opinion that the Microsoft would score major market points by adopting an open standard like H.264.
His last point speaks to the entire video ecosystem which would benefit from one standard. He says, "Agreeing on a single codec for all streaming—computer and device—would simplify life for consumers and producers alike, and advance the streaming market."
Dan Rayburn also talked about this on his blog which included a comment by Philip Hodgetts who said,
" Despite the denials, it seems like they may be doing it anyway. Microsoft evangelist Ben Waggoner linked to this article today: http://www.iis.net/default.aspx?tabid=22
"...The IIS 7.0 Media Pack supports all media file types, including WMV, FLV, and MP4,..."and "Built-in support for ASF, AVI, FLV, M4V, MOV, MP3, MP4, RM, RMVB, WMA, WMV..." Seems to suggest a tectonic shift in the standardization of media delivery."
Who didn't think this was going to be a big year for H.264?
On a related subjected, if you are a streaming media producer or online video publisher be sure to check Jan Ozer's mixed media publication, Critical Skills for Streaming Producers, available as a DVD disc in the form of a 340-page PDF file in book form, It's an incredible resource that covers all the phases of production and encoding complete extensive tutorials, bookmarks, videos and screencams. I did a promo of it here and I'll be sharing my review of it on this blog sometime soon.
I've learned a lot from reading Jan's articles in the various industry publications of the years and I want to extend my personal thanks to him for all his knowledge sharing. You rock Jan!
Techcrunch is reporting that Qik, the popular live mobile streaming service, will announce support for Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform today which will open it up to other mobile devices within the coming months.
Qik has gained widespread acceptance as the defacto standard for streaming live video from your mobile through it's early adoption by video bloggers like Robert Scoble and Steve Garfield. It's competitors include Flixwagon and Kyte.
Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch says, "Up until now Qik has only been available on Nokia smartphones based on the S60 platform. Qik says that they plan to gradually introduce support for all Windows Mobile phones (presumably with a camera and high speed data plans), though they haven’t offered a timeline for this. The Windows Mobile platform represents an absolutely massive increase in the potential userbase for Qik - Microsoft expects to sell 20 million licenses in 2008 alone."
MobileCrunch also has a transcript of an interview that Greg Kumparak conducted with Bhaskar Roy, Co-Founder and VP Product Management of Qik, and Jackie Danicki, Director of Product Marketing here.
Roy said people are embracing Qik and using it for a variety of applications. He said, "We are actually seeing very good pickup overall, where people are using Qik to do a number of things from citizen journalism, to lifestyle applications, to healthcare, and just sharing things with friends and family. Live adds an element which recorded and edited video can not do, which is impromptu. Whatever I’m doing right now, people can see it, and people can appreciate that."
He added that Qik has some very unique interactive features highlighting that,"The best part is that when I’m streaming live I can actually interact with my audience. Whoever is watching that video can chat with me, and that chat shows up on my phone. It creates an engaged interaction with me and my viewers, something that you just can not get with an edited or an on-demand type of video… After you’re done, the stream is automatically archived, and you can download it, edit it, and repost it somewhere else. We’re not taking that capability away from users, but we’re providing the capability to stream it live. If you want to edit it, you’ll have the tools to do that as well."
Below is a Qik video Mike Arrington recorded of Bhaskar Roy discussing the service with the Qik software running on a Samsung BlackJack.
In a related story by VentureBeat, Qik comes to Windows Mobile. Not Qik enough for 3G iPhone, MG Siegler says the timing is poor for Qik and that "This announcement comes just days before Apple’s WWDC event where it is expected to unveil the 3G iPhone. This device will simply overshadow all other mobile announcements in the industry for quite some time. Another potential problem for Qik are the rumors of video streaming capabilities being a central part of this new iPhone. While it’s no sure bet, there have been signs that such functionality could be a key component of an iChat application Apple is working on for the device."
Regardless of how things play out,Qik truly is a remarkable technology that's less than a year old and has the potential to explode with possibly millions of new users through it's partnership with Microsoft. Hopefully it will be able scale it's service to meet the demand and not fall into the same downtime issues that Twitter has experienced of late.
Andy Plesser has been editing his video interviews from his live Mogulus broadcast from Streaming Media East and making them available on Beet.TV.
The videos include interviews with veteran Microsoft engineer Charles Finkelstein,who runs the Expression Encoder team, Bhaskar Roy of Qik the live mobile broadcasting platform which is used by pioneer video blogger Steve Garfield. All the videos featured in this post are courtesy of Beet.TV and there are more available here.
CES has come and gone for another year and amid the Gizmodo controversy, Panasonic's 150" Plasma TV, the death of HD DVD, Apple's new MacPro and Xserve product announcements, Bill Gates last Microsoft CES keynote and hours of live coverage and blog reviews - I've assembled a few more bits and bytes of information before Apple steals the spotlight tomorrow at the Macworld Expo.
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.
