Posted by Derrick on January 28, 2010 under Video Streaming and Compression | 
Internap Network Services Corporation, a global provider of end-to-end Internet business solutions, announced that it is an Official Provider of Content Delivery Network (CDN) services for the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, January 21-31 in Park City, Utah. Sundance Institute is using Internap’s CDN – both during the Festival and on an ongoing basis – to simplify and streamline the creation, delivery and management of interactive web content that promotes the event itself and the work of independent filmmakers year-round, with guaranteed optimal quality and performance.
New forms of web content, such as podcasts, slideshows and streaming video, have become critical to the independent film community, allowing filmmakers to market and distribute their films to audiences worldwide at minimal cost. In 2009, visitors to the Sundance Film Festival website downloaded nearly three million videos; and in the months surrounding the annual Sundance Film Festival, website traffic typically surges dramatically, averaging between 50,000 – 150,000 unique visitors daily.
However, as online video gains in popularity, the performance of the network is also becoming a top priority, with viewers showing little tolerance for slow-loading video. A recent study by analytics firm TubeMogul found that 81.2% of web video viewers click away when videos are slow to load and that “rebuffering” occurs in nearly one out of every 25 streams. Internap’s CDN uniquely addresses this issue, ensuring an optimized video viewing experience through its patented Managed Internet Route Optimizer™ (MIRO) technology, which selects the best path for video traffic in real time, based on network performance characteristics instead of the least number of Internet hops.
“Our collaboration with Internap has grown to such an extent that we could not provide high-quality online content without them,” said Joseph Beyer, associate director at Sundance Institute Online. “Internap’s CDN allows us to easily create and share streaming video and other new types of content – an increasingly vital part of building awareness of our artists and bringing their work to a global audience – while ensuring a consistently reliable viewing experience, even during the dramatic spike in web traffic that occurs during the Sundance Film Festival.”
Internap’s CDN provides a complete solution for live and on-demand video streaming with “set and forget” capabilities that allow organizations to focus exclusively on content creation by simplifying and streamlining the workflow for content uploading, transcoding, management and reporting. Integration with the Adobe Flash Platform, Microsoft Silverligh and iPhone formats, Internap allows customers to maximize the consuming audience by addressing the broadest range of devices across the Internet.
Posted by Derrick on January 26, 2010 under Video Streaming and Compression |
Digital Rapids — the leading provider of tools and solutions for bringing television, film and web content to wider audiences – announced that Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts has chosen Digital Rapids’ StreamZHD high-definition media encoding system to enable new live HD streaming capabilities from Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall.
Lincoln Center is the world’s leading performing arts center, located on 16.3 acres in New York City. The center’s 12 resident organizations combine to present thousands of performances, educational programs, tours and other events each year on the Lincoln Center campus. StreamZHD is part of a complete HD production environment at the Center’s Alice Tully Hall, which also features four robotic HD cameras linked over fiber to servers, routers and switchers in the facility’s data center.
The StreamZHD system, supplied by systems integrator HB Communications, encodes content in real time for external distribution as live streams or on-demand files. Lincoln Center’s live streaming capabilities recently supported the concurrent worldwide debut performances of “The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later”, the epilogue to the acclaimed Tectonic Theater Project play. On-stage pre-show and post-performance events — including an interactive question and answer session with questions submitted via Twitter — were streamed through StreamZHD to audiences in over 150 theaters worldwide, supporting local live readings of the new play at each location. Three live streams and three on-demand archives at varying bit rates were created in the H.264 format for Web viewing through Adobe Flash technology, with StreamZHD producing all six outputs simultaneously in real time.
“It is important that our technology infrastructure is at a level of excellence commensurate with the caliber of events that we host, and the ability to stream at HD quality over the Internet is phenomenal,” said Rob Tarleton, Chief Technology Officer, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. “Our HD production and streaming capabilities are key benefits for artists, performers and groups holding events at Alice Tully Hall in the Lincoln Center, and StreamZHD is an important part of making that happen.”
“The Lincoln Center’s use of StreamZHD is a tremendous example of how high-quality Internet streaming technology can combine with the arts to create new performance dynamics and unparalleled audience reach,” said Brent Ross, Director of Sales for the Americas at Digital Rapids. “StreamZHD’s simultaneous multi-format output capabilities, outstanding quality and reliability make it the ideal solution to enable innovative streaming experiences, and we’re thrilled that Lincoln Center for the Performance Arts selected us for their world-class space.”
StreamZHD continues to raise the bar for high-definition encoding solutions, delivering multi-format video ingest, encoding, transcoding and live streaming in a versatile configuration that integrates easily into any media environment. Combining the quality and performance advantages of hardware-based preprocessing with a format-flexible and feature-rich software application, Digital Rapids systems seamlessly support live and on-demand multi-platform distribution opportunities and production workflows.
Posted by Derrick on January 24, 2010 under Video Streaming and Compression |
ViewCast Corporation, a developer of industry-leading solutions for the transformation, management and delivery of digital media over IP and mobile networks, announced that TVTI Video Technologies Inc. has selected ViewCast’s award-winning Osprey 700e HD video capture cards to underpin the company’s video analytics solutions and services for professional sports teams. With high performance Osprey 700e HD cards at the heart of TVTI’s HD video infrastructure, coaches and scouts are afforded a high resolution view of player and team performance mechanics.
“TVTI clients such as the New York Yankees rely on our video analytics technology to help them improve team performance and assess competitors’ weaknesses,” said Mark Watson, founder of TVTI. “Ultimately, the value that we provide to our clients begins at the video capture stage. Osprey 700e cards equip us with the performance and reliability that we need to satisfy our world champion clientele, while providing the configuration and management flexibility that we need to drive cost and resource efficiencies across our systems.“
“The professional athletics market is yielding some of the most exciting, innovative applications of video capture and streaming technology in the industry, and TVTI and its clients are at the forefront of this trend,” said ViewCast President and CEO Dave Stoner. “ViewCast’s advanced HD capture and streaming solutions are the ideal fit for any athletics organization seeking a high performance, high throughput video platform to efficiently deliver content to coaches, players, and fans.“
TVTI has deployed numerous Osprey 700e-equipped video/data capture systems into the field for use onsite at clients’ home games, with great results. The New York Yankees are using a TVTI system to record and archive four angles of every pitch in HD. Using four Dell Precision workstations equipped with Osprey 700e HD cards, the Yankees’ video production team records approximately 300 pitches per game, yielding 1200 raw HD AVI files for each home game. The video files are later compressed, organized, and archived for rapid retrieval.
Back at TVTI headquarters, racks of Osprey 700e-equipped Dell Precision workstations are employed to record MLB and NHL game feeds throughout the day. TVTI software tools are used to segment these feeds into individual ‘event’ files and synchronize these files with player-specific statistical data provided by third-party partners. The video is then distributed to clients, who will use it to analyze their competitors in the days preceding a game.
Renowned for their performance, reliability and management versatility, Osprey 700e HD cards enable advanced capabilities such as dual SD/HD support with seamless on-the-fly signal switching, and the ability to feed multiple encoders (RealVideo, Windows Media, Adobe Flash and MPEG-4) at the same time in any combination. The Osprey 700e HD card provides TVTI with the bandwidth required to deliver up to 1080i video resolution via a high-speed PCI Express bus, and also features configurable archiving capabilities that help simplify post-processing workflows for TVTI’s video scouting service.
Posted by Derrick on October 8, 2009 under Video Streaming and Compression |
Digital Rapids — the leading provider of tools and solutions for bringing television, film and web content to wider audiences – demonstrated new enhancements for the award-winning TouchStream live video streaming appliance at the 2009 IBC Conference and Exhibition.
TouchStream delivers Digital Rapids’ renowned streaming video quality and reliability in a fully self-contained, portable appliance with unparalleled ease of use. Software controls are accessed through an intuitive touch-screen interface with integrated video monitoring, eliminating the need for laptops, keyboards, mice and separate monitors. Flexible features allow refinement of the incoming source and the addition of branding to the outgoing stream, while models supporting multiple formats — including VC-1 and H.264 compression formats for Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash technologies — provide easy adaptability to varying project requirements.
New features include customizable, password-protected function locking. Administrators can configure a custom set of interface controls to be locked with a password, letting them limit the functions available to less experienced users to as little as desired — even just start and stop. Taking ‘one-click streaming’ a step further — to no clicks at all — TouchStream can also be configured to begin streaming with the most recent encoding parameters upon power-up, without user interaction.
Two new storage options have also been introduced for TouchStream, supporting its ability to simultaneously archive live streams to files for subsequent on-demand use. Complementing TouchStream’s existing support for external USB or IEEE-1394 storage devices, new internal hard drive and removable storage options allow the addition of archive storage without the added physical space requirements of external drives.
Digital Rapids is also gave IBC attendees a sneak preview of future functionality in TouchStream, including a Web browser-based remote control interface that looks virtually identical to the unit’s local interface.
“Industry and customer response since we began shipping TouchStream has been phenomenal, but we aren’t content to rest on that success,” said Wesley Thiessen, Product Manager, Digital Rapids Corporation. “Our new enhancements continue to make TouchStream even easier and more flexible, particularly in multi-user environments where operators have varying degrees of experience.”
Tags: Adobe Flash, Compression, Digital Rapids, live, Microsoft Silverlight, portable, streaming, streaming video, TouchStream, Video, web content
Posted by Derrick on May 3, 2009 under Video Streaming and Compression |
Sorenson Media today announced that its Sorenson Spark video decoder has been licensed by Qualcomm for chipsets targeted at the next generation of high-performance, low-power and multimedia-rich mobile phones, mobile computing devices, and other consumer products. The Sorenson Spark video codec will enable devices to play a wide variety of videos available on the Internet.
Sorenson Media’s Sorenson Spark decoder was the first codec used in Macromedia Flash, now Adobe Flash, today’s de facto standard for Web video. Sorenson Spark is the industry’s most ubiquitous video decoder and enables the playback of hundreds of millions of videos on the Internet. For example, YouTube, which is the single largest online video destination site today, utilizes Sorenson Spark.
“As mobile multimedia expectations continue to grow, we remain committed to offering our customers innovative solutions that enable a next-generation experience,” said Jason Bremner, senior director of product management for Qualcomm CDMA Technologies. “Sorenson Spark will enhance our product portfolio with comprehensive video capabilities, enriching the Internet video experience for mobile users.”
“One of the most productive features of these powerful new mobile multimedia form factors is their ability to take full advantage of Web video,” said Peter Csathy, CEO of Sorenson Media. “We are thrilled to be providing Qualcomm with Sorenson Spark to raise the bar for mobile multimedia possibilities and enjoyment.”
Tags: Adobe Flash, licensed, mobile, multimedia, next-generation, online video, Qualcomm, Sorenson Media, Sorenson Spark, video decoder, Web Video
