Streaming Media - October/November 2007 - (Page 37) IPTV Hardware ■ VBRICK ETHERNETV First runner-up: Digital Rapids StreamZ Media Encoding Systems Second runner-up: Sling Media SlingCatcher VBrick founder Rich Mavrogeanes was one of streaming’s earliest and most vocal champions. “Rich has been saying that online video is the next big thing for years,” I remember a colleague saying back in 2002, when I worked on the optical media trade magazine EMedia. “Maybe one of these years he’ll be right.” Little did we know then just how right he would be, or just how much of a mainstay his company’s flagship product—the VBrick Appliance—would become in the world of enterprise and surveillance video. VBrick EthernetTV is a much more ambitious undertaking, consisting not of a single appliance but a complete package of hardware and software that can be configured for virtually any IPTV application, whether small-business or enterprise-level in scope, unicast or multicast, live, or on-demand. Rich, we never doubted you for a minute. First runner-up Digital Rapids StreamZ falls squarely within the same application set as does EthernetTV, but second runner-up Sling Media’s SlingCatcher—a decidedly consumer product, a set-top box that beat Apple TV to the punch by making it easy to stream video from the PC to the TV—wasn’t what we had in mind for the IPTV category. Its strong showing serves to show not just how popular the appliance has become, but also to prove once again that, despite its buzzword status, “IPTV” still means different things to different people. IPTV Hardware - VBRICK ETHERNETTV IPTV Software - SLING MEDIA SLINGPLAYER MOBILE IPTV Software ■ SLING MEDIA SLINGPLAYER MOBILE First runner-up: LEAD Technologies Inc. LEADTOOLS Multimedia SDK Second runner-up: VectorMAX TVAnywhere Like I was saying about “IPTV” . . . Sling Media’s SlingPlayer Mobile wasn’t exactly what we were thinking when we envisioned the IPTV Software category, but when the nominations came in and were all over the map in terms of what this stuff actually does, we decided that, until this space shakes itself out, it was important to be as inclusive as possible. That said, SlingPlayer Mobile is yet another in Sling Media’s very cool line of time- and placeshifting tools, letting users access their Slingbox content from anywhere on their Palm OS device or Windows Media Smartphone or Pocket PC over 3G cellular service (or, closer to home, via Bluetooth). In another “they just don’t get it” moment, Major League Baseball cried “foul” over the technology, claiming it allowed viewers to violate the league’s blackout rule by watching games in markets where they’d otherwise be inaccessible. While second runner-up VectorMAX has long been a prominent name in the enterprise IPTV space (as anyone who’s visited their massive booth at Streaming Media West knows), LEAD Technologies’ LEADTOOLS Multimedia SDK took us by surprise. But one look at this flexible multimedia capture and conversion software—it supports one of the most comprehensive lists of video and audio formats we’ve seen—made it clear that it’s something we need to get to know better. WWW.STREAMINGMEDIA.COM 37 http://WWW.STREAMINGMEDIA.COM
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