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Wednesday, August 8, 2012

OTTCONversations: Sam Blackman, Elemental Technologies - The 2012 Summer Olympics Go OTT

As the world tunes in to the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London, more than 20,000 broadcasters aim to reach a potential global audience of 4 billion viewers with more than 4,000 hours of coverage. According to Sam Blackman, CEO and Co-founder of Portland Oregon-based Elemental Technologies, this year the Olympics are going over-the-top (OTT) and his company is serving up Olympic streams on a global scale with some of the biggest names in broadcast and media entertainment, including, the BBC in the UK, Terra in Latin America, Canada's Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium and Eurosport. The company is also supporting customers in the US and Japan. Elemental estimates that its multi-screen video processing deployments in 70 countries will help its broadcast customers reach upwards of a billion viewers worldwide.

Elemental Technologies provides hardware and software solutions for adaptive multi-screen video processing. Elemental Live is a linear encoder that takes live streams in and creates multi-screen outputs for live distribution, and Elemental Server is a file-based server that creates multi-screen outputs for live distribution. Blackman says that many of its customers use these solutions for large-scale sports video streaming. See my 2010 interview with Blackman from Streaming Media East, where he also demonstrated Elemental Live and Elemental Server (Larry Kless' Weblog: Elemental Delivers GPU-Accelerated Video Streaming Solutions)

I spoke with Blackman earlier this year at the Over-the-Top Conference, OOTTCON 2012, where he discussed, The Olympics Go OTT: Lessons Learned from the last 12 months in sports video streaming. Blackman says that total available TV audience for the Olympics has grown from 3.9B in 2004 to 4.7B in 2008, and that it's by far the biggest global sports even. Not only has the number of viewers grown, so has the number hours of professionally-produced live video content. Consumers want to watch the Olympics on all of their screens, and this year a record number of viewers all around the globe will watch live and video on-demand (VOD) content on TV, PCs, laptops, tablets, mobile phones and other connected devices.

“When we began the intense evaluation process for streaming of the Olympic Games more than a year ago, Elemental had little idea of just how broadly we’d be adopted on a global scale,” says Blackman.

In this video, Blackman summarizes five of the key lessons Elemental learned from working with the sports industry which it's put to use in delivering the 2012 Summer Olympics video stream.

Destination Divergence

You never know when the next iPad will hit, ...how quickly can you react?

The first key learning was around the divergence of output end-points. With its customer TF1, France's top TV channel and a leading media group in Europe, Elemental had to stream a very large event to multiple devices in Apple HLS and Flash, and set-top boxes in separate outputs for five ISPs across France, all with different packaging requirements.

"The key take-away from this sporting event," say Blackman, "was that to deliver effectively to this divergence of multi-screen devices, you absolutely have to have a software-based solution. Because only software is flexible enough to adapt to the rapidly changing multi-screen world."

Instant On-Demand

Content windows are collapsing to hour = 0, speed can be your differentiator.

The second key lesson was learned working with a company called deltatre, that powered all the highlight reels from recent the Rugby World Cup games. In this case, Elemental was taking highlights that DeltaTRE was creating and very quickly making as many as 20 multi-screen outputs for all its different highlights.

"The key here is that speed is critical," Blackman points out. "Fans want to see highlihgts of big plays as soon as possible, and having a highlight read for VOD, video on-demand consumption in two minutes, as opposed to 30 minutes is a huge difference in terms of how effectively DeltaTRE's customers were able to monetize that VOD asset. So speed of processing is very critical."

Going Global

The Olympics is a true global phenomena but every live event is now geo-agnostic.

The third lesson was learned working on a project with Brazilian-based Terra Networks which had the streaming rights for the 2011 Pan American games and was streaming to 17 different countries across Latin America. Terra was one of Elemental's early international deployments, and Elemental learned a lot about international deployments and requirements that are different internationally than domestically. In this case, multi-channel audio support was required and Elemental had to create many different audio channels and have them associated with a single video file, so that regardless of what of language is being put on top of that content, the end user could view the video and hear the audio in their own language.

The second key learning in working with Terra was around sub-titling and captioning of content, which are very different based on geography. Sub-titling and captioning requirements have changed dramatically over the past few years, and transitioning and translating between one captioning format and another is becoming more and more difficult.

"So being able to successfully translate captions across different end devices, screens and geographies is absolutely critical", stresses Blackman. "Having a solution that really has been through the wringer, in terms of international deployments is absolutely critical."

Personalized Playback

Content playback on the fans terms. just might put more fans in the seats.

The fourth key lesson was from Stanford University that deployed real-time wifi replay system where, if you are attending a Stanford football or basketball game, you can actually pull up a replay on either your iPad or mobile device, either a close call or great play. By leveraging Elemental Live which created an archive file in real-time, Stanford was able to make these on-demand highlights available instantaneously. So with in under a minute of the play occurring, fans could pull up that video clip on their mobile device.

"What this is a sign of," Blackman notes, "is a trend, that to make sure that venues and stadiums remain exciting events to attend when they're competing against really big screen televisions and fancy audio systems in living rooms. People are still going to want to go to the stadium because they get to watch the action live but they also get this personalized video replay system in their hands on their device. So as the fourth learning, and this is going to be important in more and more sporting venues moving forward."

Protocol Proliferation

Hope the DASH 'collapses the world', but be prepared in the event that it doesn't.

The final learning was from Eurosport, the Paris-based equivilent of ESPN for Europe, that is using Elemental for both live and VOD to 11 different countries.

"Here the key is that Eurosport is creating streams for devices as disparate as iOS devices (iPads, iPhones), Roku boxes, Apple TV, Flash Player on the PC and Android devices and then, Silverlight for Xbox 360 and other Microsoft applications," states Blackman. "They are creating 29 different outputs simultaneously, and having to manage the network requirements of all those outputs."

Blackman says that there's hope with MPEG-DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP), an emerging video standard that they've been developing with several other companies in the space, that it will help reduce the number of outputs from 28 down to just a few different adaptive bit rate (ABR) outputs with standardized packaging. If that happens, it holds the promise that ‘collapses the world’ into a single video standard and the proliferation of formats will start to get reduced.

Elemental recently raised $13 million is a series C funding round, with an eye on global expansion, and the 2012 Olympic Games will be Elemental’s largest live deployment to date. See this this recent press release for on Elemental's multiscreen delivery of the Summer Games: Elemental Unveils Plans to Stream the 2012 Olympic Games with Leading Broadcasters Worldwide | Elemental Technologies.

About Elemental
Elemental Technologies is the leading supplier of video solutions for multiscreen content delivery. Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Portland, Oregon, the company pioneered the use of graphics processors to power adaptive video streaming over IP networks. Providing unmatched solutions for top media and entertainment companies worldwide, including Comcast, Disney and HBO, Elemental helps content programmers and service providers bring video to any screen, anytime – all at once. The company has offices in the United States, the United Kingdom and Hong Kong. To learn more, please visit www.elementaltechnologies.com and follow @elementaltech on Twitter.

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Sunday, March 11, 2012

Online Video Consultants Say the Darndest Things

Trying to keep up with latest video workflows, video codecs, algorithms and the variety of delivery methods for multiple screens can be a daunting task for anyone. Even the experts agree that the process and tools for video content creation, management and delivery is constantly changing – and can be a challenge to master, let alone understand. Not only do we have to know about every possible screen size and resolution, device and platform, network bandwidth connections and constantly shifting “standards" to deliver any content, anytime, anywhere and on any device.

Multiscreen delivery, connected device platforms, hybrid IPTV/OTT systems, HTML5 and Flash Player customization controls, mobile app development, multi-upload content ingestion and management, advanced adaptive transcoding, mobile-ready encoding, intelligent device detection, user moderation and permissions setting, contextual social media extensions, intuitive ad server and network integration, extensible APIs, automated deep linking and media asset syndication, viewer engagement and geographic distribution reporting, etc... it's enough to make your head explode!

As the consultant's creed says, "“If you can’t convince them, confuse them!”

This amusing video pokes fun at the technical jargon that online video consultants say that makes your head spin. The video stars web video experts, Jan Ozer and Lisa Larson-Kelley, and is actually a humorous digital short to market a one-day web video workshop, Encoding, Serving, and Player Development for Multiple Screen Delivery that Ozer and Larson-Kelley are teaming up on again, in New York City on April 10, 2012. This Web Video Workshops session is a joint venture between Streaming Learning Center and LearnFromLisa.com. It's presented in two sessions and covers video encoding and video serving and player development and will provide video compressionists, web developers, content producers, and video professionals end-to-end knowledge to achieve the best playback across desktops and devices.

Ozer, author of Video Compression for Flash, Apple Devices and HTML5, will cover encoding for multiple-screen delivery and review the fundamentals of producing H.264 and WebM streams, adaptive streaming and single file and adaptive playback capabilities of Flash and HTML5 on the desktop, and iOS and Android devices, other mobile handsets and tablets and prominent OTT platforms. He'll also detail transmuxing technologies like those provided by the Wowza Media Server and Adobe Flash Media Server.

Larson-Kelley, author of Flash Video for Professionals and the producer of Lynda.com's Publishing Video with the Flash Platform and Up and Running with Flash Media Server 4.5, summarized the workshop on her blog:

"This workshop will provide an overview of the online video landscape today, map out where its going in the future, and provide clear approaches to achieving the best quality playback on the widest array of screens. I’ll give a detailed overview of the current video capabilities of HTML5 and the Flash Platform. We’ll discuss the various devices on the market today and outline their overall classifications and critical specifications. I’ll also outline systematic approaches to reaching targeted classes of devices, with the aim to provide high quality content to the widest audience."

The session is on Tuesday, April 10, 2012 from 9:00 AM to 4:30 PM (ET), New York Plaza, NY

More information and tickets available here.

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Adaptive Bitrate Technology: Meeting the Multi-Screen Challenge Head On – Matt Smith, Envivio

As the demand to deliver content to consumers on multiple screens continues to grow at a rapid pace, companies adapt their methods and means to meet the challenge. It's no longer a notion or idea on the horizon – but a mandate for many product and services in a multi-platform world, where consumers want any content on any device, anytime and anywhere. This is both exciting and worrisome for service providers and content owners – but new trends and tactics like adaptive bit rate (ABR) streaming is changing it all and making it easier to deliver content, says Matt Smith, VP of Internet Television Strategy & Solutions at Envivio.

Smith attributes the accelerated change of multi-screen delivery to the "hockey stick effect" of mobile video viewing trends. He cites Cisco's Visual Networking Index: Forecast that says, "By 2014, all forms of video will constitute 91% of global consumer Internet traffic." (from Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2010–2015 [Visual Networking Index] - Cisco Systems)

Adapting to ABR

"Adaptive bit rate encoding has been around for a few years," says Smith, "but we're really starting to see some increased uptake as broadcasters and content providers fully embrace the TV Everywhere experience. We're seeing true convergence happening."

ABR streaming was first developed by Move Networks and is now offered in several different flavors by Adobe Systems (HTTP Dynamic streaming), Apple (HTTP Live Streaming) and Microsoft (Smooth Streaming). It works by taking a single source video and encoding it at multiple bit rates. When the video is requested over the network, the content adapts to the network not the network adapting to the content. A user's bandwidth and CPU capacity is detected in real time and the quality of a video stream adjusts according to the changing conditions.

Each bit rate version is sliced up into tiny fragments and the video player pulls fragments from the different encoded versions and inserts them into the stream as bandwidth dictates. The result is faster video start times with little or no buffering which translates to better viewing experiences. (From Skytide Insight for CDNs - Adaptive Bitrate Streaming)

According to Smith:

"Adaptive bit rate gives some commonality amongst these formats, (from Adobe, Apple and Microsoft), [and] all have common codec payloads in AVC and AAC. So what we're able to do is create a common encoding experience so instead of creating every stream rendition on the encoder, we're creating resolution renditions and delivering those to the network where we catch it (if you will) in what's called a network media processor (NMP)."

Envivio's Halo product is a NMP that can take in 50 different channel renditions and output thousands of streams. A NMP is very beneficial for CDNs and has other functions like DRM, content encryption, ad detection and insertion, television ratings to closed captions. Smith says the NMP stage is the next evolution of ABR and network functionality where the customer/operator is given a lot of scale. Smith added that traditional method of streaming, in which encoder creates multiple renditions, is still very valid for operators with only a few channels. But for those operating multiple channels, this is a new and dynamic approach that they'd want to consider.

Smith advises that for content owners, all screens are a MUST HAVE, and says:

"If your media strategy excludes screens, revisit your strategy. There is no one platform or group of users you should exclude. Channel growth will exacerbate the problem – number of screens will increase."

Smith shared the following points in Adapting to ABR:

• Enables experiences/resolutions - mobile to HD
– Better QoE for viewers/users
– Adds complexity: additional renditions/screens
• Chunked formatting/delivery
– Boundaries and chunk lengths vary by format
• Video & audio payload similar between formats
– AVC/H.264 -‐ Video
– AAC -‐ Audio

‘Hey Matt - is there one universal codec?'

That was a real question an unnamed Yahoo! Engineer asked Smith in 2003, and almost 10 years later it still brings a smile to his face. Smith has been involved in every aspect of digital video systems design, compression, workflows and delivery for 15+ years, having worked with industry leaders like NBC, Yahoo!, Inlet Technologies and Cisco. He recounts how in the past, different workflows were created for the different streaming environments. There was one for web, one for mobile, one for television and for a variety of reasons there were multiple streaming formats. Hence the best question of career which he says has gotten a lot of laughs over the years.

Smith says, laugh if you will but where we are today with ABR and the common payload of AVC/H.264 video and AAC audio, it has enabled these chunked ABR type experiences creating the option to do common encoding within a M2TS wrapper to generate multiple renditions on one small platform, and enable a lot of scale.

Key Takeaways…

Smith says that with ABR, you're essentially creating similar number of streams, but in a different part of the network. You get significant scale gains and you should plan to deliver to every possible screen. The workflow not for every organization and where channel count is low, "old" models work.

It's about moving from live to live: file to live, live to file. ABR allows for real time packaging (think about… request for right device at the right time) and request based delivery, runtime encoding and delivery. The benefits of a NMP as origin server provides value beyond is packaging and assists with cache. Smith sees ABR and NMP solutions as key technologies to help service providers and content owners meet the multi-screen challenge on head on and win.

About Envivio
Envivio is a leader in solutions for multi-screen video-over-IP delivery. We design our solutions to remove the boundaries of traditional television and make the world’s video content universally enjoyable by all viewers, on any device, across any network, at any time. Now in its second decade of developing market-leading video convergence solutions, Envivio has amassed dozens of patents, pioneered video-over-IP methods, and led in the deployment of emerging standards and new technologies. Envivio’s customers include global tier-1 service providers, including eight of the top 10 mobile operators, seven of the top 10 broadband providers and three of the top four cable operators. Envivio is headquartered in South San Francisco, California and has offices worldwide including France, England, China, Singapore and Japan.

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Encoding.com Launches Vid.ly Pro, "The Universal Video URL Platform" to Help Solve Video Publishing Pain Points

One of the biggest pain points for video publishers is how to deliver video to every user on any browser or mobile device. As the fractured video landscape continues to grow in complexity and scale with no standard across platforms, San Francisco-based cloud encoding start-up Encoding.com, has built its business creating innovative solutions to help ease that pain. One such product is Vid.ly, which Encoding.com released earlier this year as a beta version and now months later, after a successful launch and overwhelming market response, Vid.ly has been released as a Pro version primarily targeting the tens of thousands of media brands, agencies, and application developers.

Vid.ly is both a clever and unique service that allows publishers to upload videos and get back a universal video url that will play your video everywhere, on any desktop browser or mobile device. When the video is uploaded to Vid.ly, it converts it into a variety of different formats and bit rates and once the video is transcoded, Vid.ly provides a short url and embed code for publishing. The beauty of Vid.ly is that publishers don't have to worry about the pain of video encoding, transcoding, file formats, display resolutions or any of the headaches involved in preparing, storing and delivering video online or to mobile devices. Vid.ly takes care of it all and when viewers click on the url, Vid.ly detects the device or browser type and delivers the correctly formatted and optimized video.

Publishers can embed the HTML5 code provided by Vid.ly directly into their web pages or Flash players, or can share the provided short URL via SMS, Facebook, Twitter or other social media outlets.

According to Encoding.com's President Jeff Malkin, Vid.ly takes on the heavy lifting that is usually done by online video platforms (OVPs) by delivering important and basic functionality (transcoding, storage and delivery through partners) along with device and browser detection all wrapped up in a single url, and he says, "The feedback we're getting is how simple it is, that's what's resonating."

Malkin says that the key features of Vid.ly Pro include, first and foremost, the API, which mobile app developers and video platforms can now all build Vid.ly directly into their content management systems, apps and workflow. Among the many new features in Vid.ly Pro, developers can now control the 25 output profiles, create unlimited source video file size, adaptive bitrate streaming for all Apple iOS devices and have a choice of CDN, either Akamai or AWS Cloudfront and more CDNs will be added throughout the year. Down the road Encoding.com plans to add analytics and a customizable HTML5 video player, and as Malkin says, "The whole goal is to maintain the simplicity of the platform."

One of the key verticals that's embraced Vid.ly, Malkin notes, are the ad agencies, which he says are signing up left and right. Mainly because they are all moving into video for their giant consumer packaged goods and branded customers, and they don't really have the video infrastructure to manage large campaigns.

"For them it's all about speed to market," he says, "so Vid.ly just removes all of that headache for them, and obviously does it for them in a very simple way."

The other key factor for agencies, says Malkin, is that up until now they've really had no choice but to use YouTube which has been what he calls "a necessary evil", but they'd rather not use YouTube. Brands want to build their own sites and not be branded as a YouTube video. "So with Vid.ly," Malkin says, "they can do that."

Another vertical that he says is very obvious, is the mobile app world, which is waiting to explode with video as the mobile photo app world already has done so. The mobile video apps world hasn't yet exploded because it also requires a massive video infrastructure, and only a few like SocialCam, Qik, Skype and Ustream each have its own massive video infrastructure. But Vid.ly takes that all off the table, says Malkin, and in fact Encoding.com is creating a wrapper for its Vid.ly API right now in Objective-C code for iOS devices that they will be releasing in about a month to make it "drop dead easy" to create video apps for the iPhone and iPad and from there move onto the other platforms.

Another use case that Malkin says they never imagined, but seems to be generating a lot of Vid.ly usage is the QR code vertical. It's gaining serious popularity with advertisers, retailers and big box stores to tie print to digital. While video is a perfect medium for QR code campaigns, it hasn't been well utilized because you never know what phone is scanning the QR code and therefore you don't know what video format to serve to that device. But storing a Vid.ly url in that QR code is simple, he says, and a prime example is a giant real estate platform that produces thousands of mailers of homes for sale and can embed a video walk through of an open house within the code. Another is big box retailers that use QR codes that can be scanned to bring up how to product videos.

Malkin says that they are getting some amazing data on where video views are coming from by platform, based on approximately 5 million views from the past 3 months of Vid.ly operations. iPhones lead the pack with 62.52%, Android 23.98%, Blackberry 11.12% and followed by iPad 2.38%. Browser views were: Firefox 51.3%, Chrome 22.2%, Internet Explorer 20.6%, Safari = 3.3% and Other 2.6%. This information will be updated quarterly on the Vid.ly homepage at http://m.vid.ly/

In April of this year, the company announced a $2 million funding round from current investors, that was used to expand the scale of Encoding.com’s operations and customer acquisition efforts. Revenue growth has been steady month over month, but Malkin says, that Vid.ly Pro will likely be the tipping point to move its revenue to the upward trajectory. While the company has received several acquisition offers, it has turned them down and it continues to focus on enhancing its products and customer experience.

"For us, our sweet spot seems to be the tens of thousands of video content publishers, agencies and app developers that live between YouTube or Vimeo and the big OVPs." says Malkin. "With Vimeo on one end of the spectrum and the heavy OVPs on the other end of the spectrum who simply need a solution that's going to have their video work regardless of where the end user in trying to view that video. That's the huge gap that Vid.ly's filling."

About Encoding.com
Encoding.com, the world’s largest video encoding service and provider of Vid.ly, the universal video platform, powers over 2,000 companies, including leading brands across media and entertainment, eLearning, retail, telecommunications, lifestyle, and advertising. Blending a flexible SaaS model using cloud-computing platforms, Encoding.com enables publishers and developers to instantly scale, while eliminating expensive video infrastructure investments, and supports all popular web and mobile formats. Gartner recognized Encoding.com as a “Cool Vendor 2011.” For ongoing company updates, please see http://blog.encoding.com, http://blog.vid.ly or follow @encodingdotcom, @vidlyURL on Twitter.

Related:

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Delivering Content to Mobile Devices

With the phenomenal success of Apple’s iPad and iPhone, and the increased adoption of Google Android-based phones, it’s never been more important to get your content on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. This session at the Online Video Platform Summit, features three industry experts in the field of mobile video delivery who discuss why you need to care about things like HTML5, Adobe Flash Mobile, and other video format-and standards-related topics, as well as provide an overview of how online video platforms can help you publish once and deliver everywhere. The session was moderated by Onlinevideo.net Senior Associate Editor Troy Dreier who introduced the session with data from Nielsen which stated 28% of U.S. mobile subscribers now have smartphones, and 41% opted for a smartphone over a standard feature phone, up from 35% last quarter. That number will continue to grow as consumers move away from the desktop and embrace the mobile experience. But of the 5.3 billion mobile subscribers (which is 77 percent of the world population) the largest growth is outside the U.S. and is led by China and India

According to Jeff Malkin of Encoding.com the growth of mobile has been fueled mainly by Apple's iDevices. Gannon Hall, of KIT digital says that mobile is important, because it's become the fastest growing video segment of video consumption and that they're seeing increasing demand from their customers to be able to make it much easier for them to deliver full featured, high-quality video experiences to mobile platforms. David Dudas of Sorenson Media agrees that the iPhone really was the game changer and with other devices entering the field, it's made video delivery to the various devices more complicated, primarily around video encoding. Dudas says if you're going to do it, spend your money wisely, hire a professional don't try to do it yourself. The complexities of device compatibility go far beyond the formats and if it's done wrong your encoded content may not play back, or it may look horribly compressed. Dudas says, "doing it right means your customers will be delighted rather than frustrated, captive rather than fleeting, which translates to more time and money spent with your business."

Malkin says that content producers are a bit shellshocked by all the complexity and says there's good new and bad news for the. The bad news is that it's going to get worse before it gets better – as far as having to prepare video the multitude of mobile devices, but the good news is that companies like his are getting better at making it easier for you. Malkin adds, "If there's any point I could make any more clear, it's something very complex that should not be done in house." Malkin admits that sound very self-serving and says, "Use somebody else then, don't use Encoding.com. The bottom line is that it takes a serious attention and focus to keep reinvesting engineering dollars into infrastructure to keep being able to prepare video for all these various devices. And from a content producer standpoint, I'd rather focus on content, the user experience, the community and not worry about the headache of transcoding video."

Watch the video below to hear more of the discussion on HTML5, H.264, WebM, Adaptive Bit Rate streaming and the growing format wars. Also, see my interviews with each of the panelist that followed this session.

Speaker Bios and Online Video Conversations

Troy Dreier, Senior Associate Editor, OnlineVideo.net

Troy is Senior Associate Editor for OnlineVideo.net and StreamingMedia.com, and is also a regular contributor to Computer Shopper, PCMag.com's blogs, Datamation, and Wi-Fi Planet. He writes a weekly consumer technology column which is published in the Jersey Journal newspaper. As a freelancer, he enjoys writing for many of the biggest magazines and Web sites in tech, and his favorite topics include online video, portable devices, GPS navigation, games, and all things Macintosh. He’d love it if you followed him on Twitter You can drop him a note here.

Gannon Hall, EVP, Global Marketing, KIT Digital

As Executive Vice President Global Marketing, Gannon leads KIT’s overall global marketing strategies. Gannon brings nearly two decades of entrepreneurial leadership experience within the emerging and established consumer Internet and enterprise software industries. Prior to joining KIT, Gannon was the COO of Kyte, a leading online and mobile video platform, where he led the company’s product strategy, marketing, business development and operations. Gannon also was a Principal at Horn Group, a premier technology marketing and digital communications agency. As head of the agency’s New York office, Gannon was responsible for client strategy, business development and operations. Under his leadership the agency won several industry accolades for their innovative approach to brand building through integrated digital marketing, communications and social media. Prior to Horn Group, Gannon led Hall Consulting, a pioneering San Francisco web design and development consultancy that he founded in 1994. Clients included a diverse set of software companies including Vitria, AvantGo (Sybase), Commerce One, and PlaceWare (Microsoft).

Read more: Connected TV: Why Google will succeed where others have failed - FierceOnlineVideo

David Dudas, VP of Product Management, Sorenson Media
As the vice president of product management, Dudas is responsible for defining and executing the online and desktop product strategies. He has more than 15 years experience developing consumer and enterprise product lines, including expertise in hosted digital media platforms and software-as-a-service. Prior to Sorenson Media, Dudas was co-founder and CTO at Eyespot, a cutting-edge technology startup that launched the world's first Web-browser-based video editing application in 2005. Under his leadership, the company filed for five patents and was granted numerous industry awards for innovation and usability. Previously, he was director of engineering at MP3.com, where his team developed the company's flagship product and helped build the company into the leading digital media service provider of its time. He has also held management positions at Universal Music Group and DivX, and holds a Bachelor of Computer Science degree from Michigan State University.

Read more: Sorenson Media Launches Cloud-Based Sorenson Squeeze Server to Enable High-Volume Video Encoding for Enterprises, Developers and Other Content Creators | Business Wire

Jeff Malkin, President, Encoding.com

Jeff is a fearless entrepreneur with a proven track record for launching technology startups. He has been the CEO / founder of two venture-backed companies for the past nine years. The most recent, Razz Inc. (funded $12M by Mayfield, Cardinal VP, Siemens Mobile Accelerator, and Garage Technology Ventures), is a technology company providing consumers in the mobile and social media space with entertaining audio and telephony-based applications. Razz services have been distributed by leading wireless carriers around the world including Telefonica Moviles, Orange, AT&T wireless, T-mobile and Vodafone For Razz, Jeff led all aspects of the business including business development, strategy, product development, operations and financing.

Prior to Razz, Jeff was CEO of FreeSamples.com, a research and analytics service provider for the consumer package goods industry (funded $17M led by GE Capital, Advance Publications, United Business Media). He grew FreeSamples.com to be the leading online sampling and product research company with clients including The Proctor & Gamble Company, Unilever and Ralston Purina. Jeff graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Music from the University of Michigan and remains an active musician in the San Francisco community.

Read more: Larry Kless' Weblog: Encoding.com Sees the Future of Video Encoding in the Cloud

The Online Video Platform Summit is a two-day event designed to help organizations of all types, not just those for whom video is their core business. Held on November 2-3 in conjunction with
Streaming Media West in Los Angeles, the Online Video Platform Summit is designed for video publishers of all types and sizes, whether small businesses looking to publish content for the first time, independent entertainment content creators, large media organizations, or anywhere in between.

Related:
Mobile Snapshot: Smartphones Now 28% of U.S. Cellphone Market | Nielsen Wire

Global mobile statistics 2011: all quality mobile marketing research, mobile Web stats, subscribers, ad revenue, usage, trends… | mobiThinking

Larry Kless' Weblog: Kyte Brings Its Online and Mobile Video Experience to KIT digital

A Simple Explanation Of The Huge WebM Versus H.264 Debate

How Will You Adapt To New Demands Of Mobile Video?

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Delivering Content to Mobile Devices

With the phenomenal success of Apple’s iPad and iPhone, and the increased adoption of Google Android-based phones, it’s never been more important to get your content on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. At the Online Video Platform Summit, our session, "Delivering Content to Mobile Devices" will discuss why you need to care about things like HTML5, Adobe Flash Mobile, and other video format-and standards-related topics, as well as provide an overview of how online video platforms can help you publish once and deliver everywhere.

Confirmed speakers for this session include:

Troy Dreier, Senior Associate Editor, OnlineVideo.net (Moderator)
Troy is Senior Associate Editor for OnlineVideo.net and StreamingMedia.com, and is also a regular contributor to Computer Shopper, PCMag.com's blogs, Datamation, and Wi-Fi Planet. He writes a weekly consumer technology column which is published in the Jersey Journal newspaper.

Read more: Online Video Platform Summit Preview: Delivering Video to Mobile Devices | OnlineVideo.net

Gannon Hall, COO, Kyte
As Chief Operating Officer, Gannon leads overall product strategy, marketing, business development and operations for Kyte, the 360° video platform. Leading media companies and marketers including MTV, ESPN, ABC, NBA, NATO, Armani Exchange, Monster Energy and many others are using Kyte to deliver innovative, live and on-demand social video experiences to audiences across multiple platforms and devices. Gannon brings to Kyte nearly two decades of entrepreneurial leadership experience within the emerging and established consumer Internet and enterprise software industries. Prior to joining Kyte, Gannon was a Principal at Horn Group, a premier technology marketing and digital communications agency with offices in San Francisco and New York. As head of the agency’s New York office, Gannon was responsible for client strategy, business development and operations. Under his leadership the agency won several industry accolades for their innovative approach to brand building through integrated digital marketing, communications and social media. Prior to Horn Group, Gannon led Hall Consulting, a pioneering San Francisco web design and development consultancy that he founded in 1994. Clients included a diverse set of software companies including Vitria, AvantGo (Sybase), Commerce One, and PlaceWare (Microsoft). Gannon began his career as a software engineer, user experience designer, web developer and consultant for companies including Pacific Telesis Group and US Web San Francisco, where he helped design and build enterprise applications and websites for clients including Rolling Stone Magazine, Proxim and Flextronics.

Read more: Connected TV: Why Google will succeed where others have failed - FierceOnlineVideo

Jeff Malkin, President, Encoding.com
Jeff is a fearless entrepreneur with a proven track record for launching technology startups. He has been the CEO / founder of two venture-backed companies for the past nine years. The most recent, Razz Inc. (funded $12M by Mayfield, Cardinal VP, Siemens Mobile Accelerator, and Garage Technology Ventures), is a technology company providing consumers in the mobile and social media space with entertaining audio and telephony-based applications. Razz services have been distributed by leading wireless carriers around the world including Telefonica Moviles, Orange, AT&T wireless, T-mobile and Vodafone For Razz, Jeff led all aspects of the business including business development, strategy, product development, operations and financing.

Prior to Razz, Jeff was CEO of FreeSamples.com, a research and analytics service provider for the consumer package goods industry (funded $17M led by GE Capital, Advance Publications, United Business Media). He grew FreeSamples.com to be the leading online sampling and product research company with clients including The Proctor & Gamble Company, Unilever and Ralston Purina. Jeff graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Music from the University of Michigan and remains an active musician in the San Francisco community.

Read more: Larry Kless' Weblog: Encoding.com Sees the Future of Video Encoding in the Cloud

The Online Video Platform Summit is a two-day event designed to help organizations of all types, not just those for whom video is their core business. Held on November 2-3 in conjunction with Streaming Media West in Los Angeles, the Online Video Platform Summit is designed for video publishers of all types and sizes, whether small businesses looking to publish content for the first time, independent entertainment content creators, large media organizations, or anywhere in between.

Monday, June 21, 2010

Encoding.com Sees the Future of Video Encoding in the Cloud

At Streaming Media East 2010, I spoke with Jeff Malkin, President of Encoding.com, to hear about how his company's cloud-based encoding business model works, and how the company and customer base has shaped up over the last year and half. According to Malkin, Encoding.com is the world's largest encoding service, which he says both seriously and facetiously – and described his company as the dominant player in the encoding SaaS (Software as a Service) space, which he admits is a new and emerging space.

Since its launch in September 2008, San Francisco-based Encoding.com has delivered over 6 million encoded videos, and encodes an average of 30,000 videos per day for its growing customer base. With more than 700 customers, Encoding.com powers the encoding and transcoding services of many leading video publishers and platforms including Cisco Eos, MTV Networks, WebMD, CarDomain, MySpace, Nokia, Kaltura, Vzaar and Giant Realm. While their roster of customers are impressive, Malkin admits that he's most excited by the various use cases of how their customers are applying the service, for media and publishing, user generated content, online education, news and information – just to name a few.

Before Encoding.com came along, Malkin says that most companies invested a lot capital expense into infrastructure and teams to manage in-house encoding requirements. Encoding.com helps solve the "build vs. buy" conundrum by offering a SaaS model that leverages cloud infrastructure through an XML API. The company is the only video encoding SaaS provider integrated with both EC2 and Cloud Servers, with storage choices with Rackspace and Amazon.

He maintains that Encoding.com makes it easy at a very high level:

"You tell us where the source file is located – that can be at a CDN, cloud storage, secure FTP – the one or many ways you want each file to be transcoded, and where do you want us to deliver it to. Which is 9 out of 10 times to your CDN for serving."

Malkin described Encoding.com's value through cost-savings, quality, and a scalable solution:

"By approaching the market this way, we solve some critical pain points for our customers. Number one is this instant notion of infinite scalability. No longer do you need to worry about making these large investments up front or being able to predict your video encoding requirements. There's this notion of having to manage this in-house – as many of us know in the video encoding space, video encoding is somewhat of a black art, there's lots of errors that occur, it's not really a science yet – and by outsourcing it to an automated platform such as Encoding.com, it's our job to manage that effort for you, and as you know, stay on top of the latest and greatest of the technologies that continue to evolve."

Encoding.com supports all the major and emerging web and mobile media formats, including Apple's HTTP streaming and Google's new open source WebM format. In a guest post for VideoNuze, Malkin offered some insight and advise on how to navigate the video format wars. With confusion in the online video marketplace with HTML5/H.264 vs. Flash vs. Silverlight vs. WebM, he says it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

According to Malkin:

"While both H.264 and VP8 are good quality codecs, only VP8 is currently royalty-free and therefore, has a great opportunity to emerge as the new leader within the next year or two. However, for web distribution today, we recommend encoding your videos using the H.264 video codec in an .mp4 container. This is a high-quality output format already supported by Flash, and the leading HTML5 browsers including Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer v9."

Malkin says that the mastermind behind Encoding.com is his partner, Greggory Heil, Encoding.com's Founder and CEO, and for him it was born out of necessity. Heil was running a software company focused on building and managing user-generated video sites, and wanted to streamline the incompatibility issues he kept running into with encoding and ingesting of video content. He found only expensive hardware solutions on the market and saw an opportunity to fill a gap in the market using his background in product development and application hosting services. Heil relaunched Encoding.com as a SaaS video encoding platform in September 2008, moving into the cloud and away from the company's roots of the mid-1990s where they hand coded and archived source video content from videotape formats. Encoding.com was named one of seven finalists in Amazon Web Services' 2008 $100,000 Startup Challenge.

Encoding.com also received praise from Streaming Media EVP Dan Rayburn earlier in the year, in a post: Encoding.com Would Be On My List Of Top Companies To Watch In 2010 | The Business Of Online Video.

Rayburn said:

"One of the things I really like about Encoding.com is that they are small, focused and want to be the best at only one thing. Their executives know the market, have spent a great deal of time and effort to create a very good platform and frankly, I think they are really smart. They know what they want to be, where their service fits into the market and what problem they need to solve. In just about every piece of the video ecosystem, be it content delivery or video management, there tends to be many players, but one clear leader. While Encoding.com is not the only SaaS based transcoding service on the market, they are already by far the leader in the space and I expect them to further dominate this segment of the market this year."

In addition, Streaming Media magazine selected Encoding.com as an, “Editors’ Picks 2010 – The Best of the Best”, as one of the top ten hottest companies in the world of online video.

Last week, the company released a new API that allows customers to offer Encoding.com as a white-label solution within their own platforms. In December 2009, Encoding.com closed a $1.25 Million Series A funding from VC and angel investors. Malkin says the company will use the funds to fuel aggressive sales, marketing, and brand awareness initiatives. Encoding.com plans to stay hyper focused on their core business and customers.

Malkin also spoke at Streaming Media East panel session: B203: Automation and Workflow Solutions for Transcoding Your Video Content and you can view the archive of that session here: Conference Videos - StreamingMedia.com

About Encoding.com
Encoding.com, the world's largest video encoding service, makes video transcoding into all popular formats easy, cost-effective and instantly scalable for global enterprises and SMBs including video sites, agencies, and website development platforms. As the first and only encoding service offering service level agreements, Encoding.com removes the necessity for its customers and partners to make heavy investments in expensive hardware/software solutions and overhead required to manage high-volume video transcoding needs and backs it with a wait-time service level guarantee. Encoding.com received Series A funding in 2010 from Metamorphic Ventures and angel investors: Patrick Condon, Fred Hamilton, Zelkova Ventures, Dave Morgan and Allen Morgan. It was selected as an Editors’ Pick for 2010 by StreamingMedia. This Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business is based in Denver, Colorado and San Francisco, California. For more information about Encoding.com, visit http://www.Encoding.com.

Monday, June 7, 2010

Andy Beach explains, "What the heck is H.264 SVC?"

Last month at Streaming Media East 2010, I caught up with Andy Beach, Chief Evangelist at Seawell Networks and author of Real World Video Compression, and asked him to explain, "What the heck is H.264 SVC?" Andy was at Streaming Media East to promote the release of Seawell Networks' Lumen 1000, a turnkey appliance for encoding H.264 scalable video coding (SVC) streaming video across multiple platforms. This was SeaWell's first product announcement following a $7 million in Series A funding announcement earlier in the year.

Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is a new extension of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video compression standard that enables multi-platform and adaptive streaming from a single file. Andy explained that existing adaptive bit rate technologies creates multiple files that enhances the viewing experience. Yet it puts a real burden on the infrastructure, and increases the workload and cost of content creation, storage and delivery. But with SVC, instead of producing separate streams, the SVC encoder converts the source into layers in an "encode once serve many" model. The SVC stream is comprised of 3 dimensions – clarity, spatial, and temporal layers and each layer adds information to the lower layers, rather than just duplicating information into multiple bit rates.

According to Andy,

"This allows big content producers creating a wide range of content to deploy more content out on network, because you can spend less time creating each individual file that you want to deliver."

The Lumen 1000 is a transcoding appliance that converts the source video into layers, starting with a base layer that contains the lowest level of quality, and is backwards compatible with existing H.264 players. In addition to the base layer, the encoder also creates enhancement layers that contain video quality, size/resolution, and frame-rate information. This allows multiple bit rates to be derived from a single file with a little headroom of only 10 to 20% larger than the highest bit rate required. SeaWell says that content owners encoding with the Lumen 1000 will see a 50-70% reduction in storage needs over current multi-bitrate encoding solutions.

Andy says we're in the early days of SVC adoption. It's a new standard that is just starting to come into its own this year, but we'll hear a lot more about later in the year and it's really going to blow out next year. Current SVC deployments can be found primarily in the videoconferencing space powering products like Google video chat and Cisco TelePresence. While the media and entertainment world has not yet embraced SVC as a playback option – they are paying attention.

Glenn Goldstein, vice president media technology strategy, MTV Networks had this to say:

"With the rise in demand for premium content to be available across multiple platforms, the industry needs an approach that can efficiently target appropriate quality to a range of devices with a wide variety of computing capabilities, and be able to adapt smoothly to variable network conditions. SVC’s scalable single-encode approach looks promising for addressing these problems in a more efficient manner than the current multi-bitrate multi-encode technique used by much of the industry.”

SeaWell will continue to bring more new SVC products to market and some may even have a software component. For now though, the company is excited to be launching the first SVC video streaming solution.

About SeaWell Networks
SeaWell Networks Inc. is a provider of Internet video delivery products designed for use by content producers and their content delivery partner organizations. SeaWell combines video compression standards and network level intelligence to uniquely create and deliver a high-quality viewing experience online while significantly reducing the cost of distribution. For more information see http://www.seawellnetworks.com

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Saturday, June 5, 2010

Elemental Delivers GPU-Accelerated Video Streaming Solutions

Last month at Streaming Media East, Sam Blackman, CEO and Co-Founder of Elemental Technologies, demonstrated Elemental Live and Elemental Server, two enterprise-class video processing systems for live and on-demand streaming. The Portland, Oregon-based software company, has pioneered the use of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) and other massively parallel chips for video processing capable of handling multiple simultaneous tasks with much higher performance than CPU (central processing unit)-based transcoding. Blackman says that Elemental is the first company to take advantage of GPUs for video processing and that their solutions help lower the total cost of streaming video. Elemental Server was released in November 2009 and Elemental Live was recently launched at NAB in April 2010.

Blackman explained that Elemental Live works by taking a couple GPUs to create many concurrent real-time encoded versions of the input file. A single Elemental Live can simultaneously encode for any number of mobile handsets, either iPhone, iPad, Android devices, Flash, Microsoft Silverlight and more, for adaptive bit rate protocols, HTML 5 and multiple HD streams. Elemental Server takes files in and batch encodes to output files with two NVIDIA Corporation. video cards (each with two GPUs) as well as two quad-core CPUs.

The company says that through the combination of by combining GPU and CPU processing, one Elemental Server replaces up to seven dual quad core 3GHz CPU-only servers. Both products are single rack mount units with multiple inputs and outputs. Elemental says the two products are ideal for for broadcasters, studios, online video platforms and any other video transcoding application, and are much more cost-effective than other solutions. Elemental Live has a price tag of $36,000 and Elemental Sever sells for $26,000.

Demonstration Video - How the Elemental Video Engine Works

Elemental's products are targeted to large data center operations and studios that require a sturdier solution than cloud alternatives HD Cloud and Encoding.com. Elemental customers include Brightcove, CDC, Citrix, Highwinds and InQtel, and partners with Adobe, Microsoft, and Nvidia. Blackman co-founded Elemental technologies in 2006 with CTO Jesse Rosenzweig and Chief Architect Brian Lewis, who along with Blackman were former engineers of semiconducter company Pixelworks. Soon after their launch, Pixelworks provided seed funding to Elemental for initial reach and development and in July 2008 Elemental had raised a total $7.1 million Series A.

Elemental Technologies was recognized as one of 10 companies chosen for NewTeeVee’s Next Big Thing List for 2009 for their innovation in online video. Blackman was on hand to demo the GPU-accelerated Elemental Server which he debuted at the event. Other Elemental products include Elemental Accelerator for Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 renders Blu-ray quality AVC/H.264 files using the GPU and Badaboom, a consumer media converter, in partnership with NVIDIA Corporation.

About Elemental
Elemental Technologies is the leading provider of massively parallel video processing solutions for enterprise video customers. Elemental's products use off-the-shelf, programmable graphics processing units (GPUs) for compute-intensive video processing tasks. Founded in 2006, Elemental is headquartered in Portland, Oregon. To learn more about Elemental, visit www.elementaltechnologies.com.

Follow Elemental (elementaltech) on Twitter
Check out the Elemental Technologies blog

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