Streaming Media - October/November 2007 - (Page 28) servers. We manage the whole process of choosing the right video for the right handset, so the video doesn’t have to move anywhere,” says Barbieri. This can be important, given the limited bandwidth of mobile networks and limited storage of mobile devices. Transpera also enables the decidedly social act of allowing users to easily upload and share videos of their own creation. Getting started with Transpera is a straightforward endeavor. “We’ll make it brain dead-easy for you to create and manage mobile video channels. Literally, if you send us an RSS feed with your video, we can turn around a mobile app within weeks if not days,” says Barbieri. “Plus we’ll help you monetize this content through carrier relationships and advertisers as well.” Enabling advertising is a key component of Transpera’s offerings. “We’re not only helping the content get out there, we’re helping integrate advertising in a way that will be unobtrusive,” says Barbieri. “We have four key ad components: your typical banner and text links, which can be dynamically stitched on the server side and delivered as part of a video experience; instream video ads like pre-rolls; and the last is what we call pocket sites, which are sites we build where there’s an action, like submitting an email address or 1 and 20 million uniques a month, rather than the media giants, who are more likely to build these capabilities out themselves. Transpera is already working with a handful of content owners and a mobile carrier, and they plan to launch with all their partners by the end of the year. video to go Vizrt—Power of Broadcast TV 3D Graphics Gone Mobile While delivering good-quality video to a mobile device can be a challenge due to bandwidth and screen-size limitations, even more challenging can be delivering good-quality text to go along with that video. Much of what’s on TV today, particularly news and sports, is overrun with on-screen text. Whether headlines or sports scores, broadcast TV increasingly relies on complex 3D animations to whoosh text into frame and keep it dynamically updated. The problem, though, is that what may look slick on TV often doesn’t translate to the mobile experience. Screen sizes are smaller, so text can become illegible, and bitrates are lower, so fast motion and moving graphics are often muddled and herky-jerky. Simply put, repurposing broadcast video straight to a mobile device will not work if you want the text and graphics to be readable. Vizrt’s Multi-Platform Suite delivers data-intensive 3D graphics and text separately from the video it accompanies. LG Electronics President/CTO Dr. H. G. Lee with mobile devices receiving an LG/Harris MPH signal during a demo. mobile number, that we build out specifically for our advertising partners.” Just by knowing a user’s phone number, Transpera can do things like geographic targeting, as well as contextual targeting based on the content they’re watching. Transpera’s ideal customers are content owners who have an audience for online video that they want to extend into mobile markets. “The sweet spot is in that area where they’ve done a great job on the web, but they don’t want to invest in building a custom mobile infrastructure,” says Barbieri. Their preference is actually to work with sites that are realizing between 28 STREAMING MEDIA October/November 2007 But Norway-based Vizrt is offering another way to deliver text and graphics. Vizrt’s bread and butter is its high-end real-time 3D renderer used primarily by broadcasters to insert dynamic text and graphics over video. Today, they’re readying the launch of a new extension of their product into the mobile space: the Vizrt Multi-Platform Suite. “When you’re presenting video and graphics in the same stream you have a very tough challenge in making that graphic readable,” says Bernt Johannessen, SVP of U.S. Operations for Vizrt. “What we do is separate the two so the video stream is one thing and the graphic is
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