Streaming Media White Paper 2008 - (Page 37) www.streamingmedia.com 37 TVStation An Interactive Streaming TV Application JOE LOPEZ, FLASH DEVELOPER, INFLUXIS at an accelerated rate with no signs of slowdown. While many sites have implemented an internet TV solution, many more are just now researching the topic and discovering that implementing such a solution can be a costly challenge in time and resources and can require advanced programming skills for modification and deployment. Many available internet TV solutions are expensive, hard to maintain, and require private development costs to turn out the desired product. Yet, very few offer the true internet TV experience and instead offer alternative technology with limited features and substandard quality. This leaves consumers wanting and asking for more. The ideal solution for most is a simple plug-andplay application that delivers a quality experience. Influxis answers this call by introducing the TVStation Flash application. The TVStation is one of several complementary, pre-built Flash applications Influxis offers with their Adobe Flash Media Server 3 hosting service. Internet TV is growing been aired. Full playback controls, including full-screen playback, are available. Live Broadcasting Apart from scheduling pre-recorded content, TVStation also has a built-in live broadcaster, which allows administrators to broadcast and/or record live video. The broadcaster comes with several camera and microphone settings to optimize the broadcast experience and includes the option to run another Influxis application called FMEWebViewer as a plugin. This allows administrators to broadcast live hi-definition video to connected viewers.Added to the live Figure 1. Scheduler (top) and viewer interface (bottom) Easy 24/7 Scheduling TVStation is a web-based application that enables users to quickly set up their own internet TV station. Through TVStation, users can broadcast video, audio, and image media content in real time. Broadcasts can be set up through a userfriendly administration interface. Administrators schedule media content to broadcast to end viewers through a viewer end interface (see Figure 1). All scheduled shows are broadcast in real time according to the time zone selected on the administration end. Since broadcasts are based on real time, they run on a calendarbased system that runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This means TVStation works as a true TV station should work; it runs media content at exactly the time it was scheduled without down time. With this round-the-clock scheduling, it may appear tedious to set up a daily schedule for each week, month, or year. However, a user-friendly interface that includes playlists and recurrence systems makes scheduling a snap. The playlist system allows the administrator to build a list of media content, and the recurrence system then allows the re-broadcasting of this playlist over and over again through a range of dates that the administrator specifies. This system makes it easy for an administrator to literally have a year’s worth of programming set up within minutes (see Figure 2). All scheduled content can also be enabled for on demand functionality in the end user viewer interface. On demand playback can be enabled for all media content or can be enabled only after the media content has Figure 2. Settings & recurrence http://www.streamingmedia.com
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