Streaming Media - June/July 2008 - (Page 86) Everything Old Is New Again m Streams of Thought any of us are just back from the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show as I write this. Attendance was down a bit—quite a bit if you ask the cabbies—but word from the vendors is that the quality of booth visitors was up. “Traffic through our booth was better than ever, both in quantity and quality,” says Mike Nann of Digital Rapids. “Overall our qualified leads were up, and [there were] lots of people very serious about buying in the near future.” There were several trends at the show, including the continued ascent of H.264 for both standard-definition and high-definition content. Although one of the lead pioneers in the format—Apple—wasn’t there, numerous companies showed off live H.264 encoding solutions. Broadcast International, a satellite service provider, has been working on a technology for about 6 years that will provide the ability to transcode between multiple codecs. This idea came about a few years ago when the company created its own decoder, which was designed to handle almost every compression so that set-top boxes could receive any content and decode it. But the rise of H.264 has caused the company to shift gears and focus on transcoding rather than decoding in a system named CodecSys, which Broadcast International calls a “video operating system.” “We have our own decoder that would enable us to even compress farther down,” said Broadcast International’s CEO Rodney Tiede. “We are staying in an H.264 standard just because that’s what everyone is looking for today.” Two rival compression approaches were also touted at NAB. Microsoft continued its push forward with VC-1, buoyed by its Silverlight 2.0 demonstration, while Sun Microsystems announced it was building what it called a “royalty-free and open video codec” H.264 equivalent. “There are key markets like the web that need, for the Web 2.0 experience, a foundation of royalty-free for the media element,” said Rob Glidden of Sun’s TV & Media division. Given the fact that Sun’s Open Media System is based on an H.26x implementation, it would have the potential to be somewhat compatible with H.263 and possibly baseline H.264 profiles. Another trend at the show was toward HD content, which isn’t surprising given NAB’s emphasis on broadcast technologies. The continued rollout of disk-based and other tapeless systems means that content acquisition and editing in HD will continue to become faster. Focus Enhancements even showed off its FireStore FS-5 hard disk recorder, which has the ability to add metadata to shots on-the-fly via the use of a USB Wi-Fi card plugged directly into the FS-5 and linked to an iPod Touch for shot logging and metadata insertion. I was delighted to find this addition to the FireStore line, as I’d been reminiscing at dinner the evening before with Mark Randall—now with Adobe but also a founder of NewTek, Play, Inc., and Serious Magic—about Play’s old Pocket Producer shot logger. “I’ve always said I would have never created tools like Pocket Producer if I were a better filmmaker, but I found that some of my crutches were also helpful to other people,” said Randall, adding that the Palm-based product may have been ahead of its time. Adobe also got into the metadata game, demonstrating the way that it could carry metadata out of the editing system and into the distribution system via a link between Premiere Pro and Flash. While there are still several significant bottlenecks where metadata is lost in the acquisition-production-post distribution cycle, the new media industry is finally pulling traditional postproduction and broadcast shops into the “save the metadata” camp. More on these metadata gaps can be found in the Digital Media section of my blog at http://timsiglin.com (look for “The Metadata Conundrum” posts). A final trend at the show was a move toward mobile video. With broadcasters already the firm owners of the television screen and rapidly making inroads into the desktop/laptop screen, mobile video represents an ability to take lessons from the early days of streaming media and leverage new ad-based revenue models, especially ads that are highly geographically focused. As a complement to the trend toward mobile video, Createcna showed off its European award-winning video reporting tool, 3G Mobile Studio, which allows reporters with a videoequipped 3G phone to stream video back to their newsrooms while watching their anchors live on their screens. This allows for interaction between reporters and anchors in real time with no discernable lag. Tim Siglin (writer@braintrustdigital.com) writes on digital media business models and “go-to-market” strategies. He is chairman of Braintrust Digital, a digital media production company, and co-founder of consulting firm Transitions, Inc. Comments? Email us at letters @streamingmedia.com, or check the masthead for other ways to contact us. By Tim Siglin 86 STREAMING MEDIA June/July 2008 http://timsiglin.com
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