Streaming Media - June/July 2008 - (Page 34) It’s All in the A Look at the Top Video Players of Today and Tomorrow by Ezra Davidson A soft voice says, ‘It is the question that drives us. It is the question that brings us here. You now what the question is, just as I do.’ I respond, ‘What is the best video playback technology?’ The soft voice answers back, ‘The answer is out there, neophyte. Write about it, and it will find you.’ s you can tell, I watch way too much media, which is why today’s video media playback technologies are so compelling to me. I have a lot of experience with digital media technologies. As a result of those experiences, I have learned quite a bit about media players and their related technologies. I first started playing audio on my computer around 1995 with some technology a friend told me about called RealAudio. I was working in the radio broadcast industry at the time, and my buddy Tim was one of our engineers. I respected Tim a great deal, especially when it came to anything that had to do with the internet, as he had started one of the first ISPs in San Francisco's Bay Area. Tim said that a company called Real Audio had created something called an audio player that could play back audio on my PC. I remember playing some sort of animated cartoon along with the audio. The cartoon was awful, but I still thought it was the coolest thing ever. That brief experience was probably one of the things that propelled me to start an internet company 4 years later. The company was called SyncCast, and it was the manifestation of my efforts to synchronize broadcast media with the internet. That didn’t turn out to be such a good idea at the time, but the company later developed technology that helped companies launch streaming and video-on-demand (VOD) services. With our largest customer, Microsoft, we helped to launch the Xbox LIVE Video Marketplace, which became the No. 2 online video service. I recently sold SyncCast to Technicolor. However, today’s media playback technologies are not synchronizing broadcast media onto the internet. Instead, they are actually advancing broadcast media by leveraging the internet as a delivery medium. As such, these technologies are now becoming disruptive far beyond the confines of the web. The industry has come up with a new term to describe today’s media delivery technology: rich interactive applications (RIA). Microsoft’s technology is called Silverlight, which the company describes A 34 STREAMING MEDIA June/July 2008
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.