On2 and Viewcast announce partnership to bring live Flash video solutions to market

I always confuse Viewcast and Viewpoint...two very different things. You have probably seen a Viewpoint ad and thought it was Flash. They've had an AIR-like, out of the browser plug-in for quite some time; not for creating RIAs, but but for very robust high-end rich media work for the big spenders.

This post, however, is about a ViewCAST partnership that should make live streaming Flash a more marketable product.

A better way to stream media?

This is an interesting read about an Israeli company, Arootz, who say with 20 servers they can satisfy the streaming television demand of America and free up network bandwidth simultaneously. Their model uses multicastng and the concept that with the sinking price of hard drives (a one terabyte drive will cost $100 USD by next year) each home could have their own media server and get their media pushed to them with one file as opposed to both P2P like Joost & Bablegum and/or with thousands of media servers like Akamai or Limelight. For the full story click here.

Move vs. Flash FLV

I read this today from Informitv - one of my favorite blogs that provides an informed view of the future of television, including enhanced, interactive, broadband, video-on-demand and personal television services.

They had an interesting article about Move vs. other platforms on June 17th. The delivery system plays off apachi/IIs web servers without expensive rtmp servers (Akamai, Vital Stream etc..) and the quality I've seen so far is top notch (though maybe not true streaming..I don't know). I also have the latest Flash player with 1080p support in the AVM2 and know I could suss that with Red5 but the fact that Move covers packet loss, decreases buffering, but most importantly, some degree of user tracking is built in. This is very huge for Agency media buyers these days and maybe a valid argument why ABC switched.

I spent some time today checking it out so I downloaded the player, which has a a rather small footprint and the download time was <= the flash player. And I must say, the video does what they say...it begins very quickly (my data rate after 10 seconds was approaching 2000kbps which means either this is too good to be true, or I was probably watching video off a very powerful dedicated cluster of servers.

Nonetheless, it's impressive, quick, responsive, and I don't know much more about it. Here's an image of the model(left) I am very curious to know how it works and what it's built with. I looked at the job openings and figured if you follow the skill set they are looking for, maybe you can deduct how it's made. If anyone has more in depth insight, please let me know.

I want to learn more about the tracking APIs with Move as I do this daily and rely on DoubleClick, Omniture's ActionSource, and our own home made classes for tracking, but if Adobe stepped up development in integrating reporting and tracking as perhaps a near top-level of what the media package inherits from, perhaps it would benefit the FLV platform.

MOVE is looking for software developerso on the core team who should have the following qualifications: Qualifications: * Bachelor Degree or higher (CS, EE, Math or Information Technology preferred) * Experience: minimum 2 years experience in software development and SQA test development (or advanced degree) * 3 or more years programming experience preferred * 1 or more years software testing experience preferred * Experience with unit, system, integration, and performance testing in an Agile development environment * Experience with formal testing methodologies * Excellent coding skills and a passion for software quality * Understanding of network protocols and configurations * Experience with various operating systems, especially Windows (2000, XP, Vista), Macintosh OS X, and Linux / Unix (Redhat) * Strong understanding of and experience with Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari * Able to maintain professional working relationships * Self-motivated with good decision-making abilities * Strong logical & problem solving skills * Superior and proven attention to detail * Ability to learn quickly and work in a fast moving environment with quick turn around Desired Skills: * Previous multimedia experience highly desired * Experience with: Python, Javascript, HTML, C, C++, Java, C#, CSS, SQL * Knowledge of software development life cycle * Database configuration, administration and design * Strong software design and development skills * Ability to create and follow development plans and schedules * Superior written and verbal skills * Excellent trouble-shooting and debugging skills * Experience setting up and configuring computer systems Networking: Firewalls, proxies, DHCP, DNS, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS Browsers: IE, Firefox, Safari Video: ingestion, encoding, decoding, rendering, repurposing, codec Operating Systems: Windows 2000 / XP / Vista, Macintosh OS X, RedHat Linux Testing: Black Box, White Box, Static, Dynamic, Unit, Component, Integration, System, Performance, Reliability. I'm definitely going to be following this product to see where it leads and how it impacts, more than anything, my Akamai (AKAM) stock :)

Anybody have more insight on the guts of this thing? I'd love to hear. Thanks!

Uniqlock

This is an odd little clock, that perhaps I'll put in the right column if/when the Flinstones meets Macy's Dept.store soundtrack changes.

--good times.....good times...