Streaming Media - June/July 2008 - (Page 42) it’s all in the delivery Media content. You can use Adobe’s new AIR technology for building rich media experiences using Apple’s streaming servers, but Apple doesn’t have its own RIA environment, something Adobe and Microsoft are investing in. Apple has also recently become very insular about its streaming and VOD technologies without providing any reason. For now, the company seems content being the quiet giant in the space. Others Things to Watch EVOLUTION OF VIDEO DELIVERY NETWORKS RealNetworks If you listen and/or watch content over the internet, you can thank RealNetworks for pioneering the technology back in 1995. However, if you talk to many folks in the streaming media industry, they will tell you that Real’s product offerings have become stale and insignificant. Although this might be the current perception, it doesn’t accurately represent the state of the company’s technology and accomplishments. “Real’s mission is to provide digital entertainment to consumers whenever and wherever they want, and while some of the ways they do that are better known to consumers [like Rhapsody, RealArcade, RealPlayer], the company continues to innovate and evolve as the way people consume media evolves [PC to mobile],” says Sally Julien, a spokesperson for the B2B division of RealNetworks. Real’s technology and services power some of the largest broadcast initiatives on the web today. The company’s media division makes more than $100 million a year from Rhapsody and its other online initiatives, and it makes an equal amount in licensing its technology. The company also recently announced the purchase of the online game distribution company Trymedia from Macrovision. Much of Real’s recent growth has come from delivering content to mobiles phones and distributing games. And revenues for the company were up 44% to $567 million for 2007. That said, licensing revenue increased by only a meager 2%, as the company is clearly more focused today on building consumer-facing solutions with and for content and consumer electronic companies than it is on supporting CDNs and developers with its technology. But that doesn’t mean that Real’s technology is stale. If Apple is the quiet giant in the space, Real is the sleeping giant. It has made nice with Microsoft, has battle-proven its technology by streaming content (such as the reality TV show Big Brother and running the Rhapsody music download service), and has the only technology that supports RTSP streaming of H.264 and all other major streaming formats, including Windows Media. (It doesn’t support Flash, but since Adobe now supports H.264, it can support the Flash player.) The company’s solution is expensive, but Real also offers to stream your content for you via the Real Broadcast Network. So if you have the cash and you want or need a solution with battle-proven technology that easily supports all major media formats, Real may be the only game in town. 42 STREAMING MEDIA June/July 2008 Move Networks doesn’t provide any technology you can license—yet. Instead, Move is a new breed of company that I like to refer to as a video delivery network (VDN). Move’s technology is powering ABC’s streaming video initiative, and the company has a host of other notable clients. Its technology breaks streams into what the company calls “streamlets” through a process it calls “Simulcoding.” The process is innovative and is able to securely deliver high-quality streams to the user’s PC. Move is well-funded and has recently partnered with Microsoft to develop a Silverlight player, which was demonstrated at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference this past April. However, the company’s technology relies heavily on HTTP which embeds some , technical restrictions that may make Move vulnerable to other emerging technologies. Digital Fountain is another company that fits into the VDN category. The company has long had the technology for delivering quality video over the internet, for backhauling content between studio locations, and, more recently, for delivering content to consumers over closed-cable and telco networks. It recently launched its VDN (which I previewed at NAB via the company’s new demo site at www.dfsplash.com) on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (aka Amazon EC2). Digital Fountain specializes in delivering high-quality streams by minimizing the number of lost packets in a user’s online session. It also breaks content into multiple streams, but its superior error correction technology may give it an advantage and allow it to gain significant market share in the VDN space. The company will also continue to license its technology to other third parties. It recently announced its first major client, SPEEDtv, which produces cable television content and the popular PINKS show, on which drag racers face off for the title, or pink slip, to the loser’s car. If you want to hand over your video initiative as a managed service, then these companies and others— including my old company, which has become Technicolor Electronic Distribution Services—are good alternatives to consider. POPULARITY OF H.264 CREATES THE VIDEO SERVER ERA With the advent of H.264 and especially with Adobe’s support of H.264 in its Flash player, many companies can now focus on developing video server technologies without being concerned about the player or the client application. Companies such as MobiTV and Broadcast International, which Streaming Media Magazine covered during the NAB conference, are representatives of these types of companies. MobiTV has built a video server based on RSTP that can seamlessly deliver content to many mobile devices without configuration for each. “What we developed was, by a wide margin, more innovative than anything we could find in the marketplace,” says co-founder and president Peter Scanlan. “As a result of that, because we http://www.dfsplash.com
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