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Scooped by
Nicolas Weil
December 16, 2011 4:41 PM
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BBC R&D has developed a universal control system API that opens up a wide range of possibilities for interacting with your TV across multiple devices. The technology allows a network-connected device, be it a smartphone, laptop or toy Dalek, to talk via the home network to a set-top box that runs a particular piece of software. By doing this, a connected device can obtain the information it needs to synchronise things to the box, such as images or audio. The API (application programming interface) that the software implements is called Universal Control.
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Scooped by
Nicolas Weil
December 16, 2011 1:24 AM
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Mobile devices and tablets offer TV networks new opportunities to create interactive programming that extends to second screens.But, do users, in fact, want to watch TV and engage with related content simultaneously? Entertainment checkin application Miso presumed the answer might be yes, but it wanted to test the hypothesis to learn more. So Miso created Miso Sync, a private beta application for Android. Built by Miso’s in-house innovation team Miso Labs, Miso Sync works only with Boxee. On launch, the application can determine whether there’s a Boxee device in the room, connect to the device and automatically identify what the user is watching and how far along he is in the show. Miso Sync then displays character or show information on the mobile screen in real-time, timed and synced with the show’s content — much like what VH1 did with Pop-Up Video, but on the second screen.
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Scooped by
Nicolas Weil
December 15, 2011 4:27 PM
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Deb Roy, a faculty member at MIT and founder of Bluefin Labs, a Social TV solutions company, gave a mind-blowing social TV presentation at Paris-based internet gathering LeWeb last week. Sure, there’s been lots of talk of late about social TV: but to our knowledge, few companies are analysing social media conversations as deeply as Bluefin Labs right now. For Roy, the initial aim of his company was to “study the interplay between language and context in TV.” Henry Ford’s infamous claim that “half my advertising is wasted; I just don’t know which half” was also a key inspiration, said Roy. Indeed, the feedback loop social media provides can be particularly useful for brands, producers and broadcasters.
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Scooped by
Nicolas Weil
December 14, 2011 4:40 PM
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The BBC is experimenting with iPads to speed production and better incorporate metadata at the point of acquisition for use throughout the programme’s lifecycle, writes Adrian Pennington. The focus of the Automated Production project at BBC R&D and demonstrated at BBC R&D North, is to use data and networking tools to power programme workflow. Alongside major pieces of IT research for post production and playout it is an attempt “to take it back toward the cameras and to the people making the programmes,” explained Lead Technologist, Jon Rosser.
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Scooped by
Nicolas Weil
December 14, 2011 4:21 PM
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In this article, we shall outline the steps required to build a private Content Delivery or Distribution Network (CDN) using a VPS with Varnish Cache and Nginx. The goal is to build a CDN using free, readily available software but most importantly spend the least amount of funds possible. To this end, all nodes participating in this network are going to be virtual machines (Xen, Virtuozzo, OpenVZ, etc). Our global CDN can not only keep the latest copy of static files closer to our global visitors but can also cache the most used pages (dynamic or not) in memory on the edge nodes! This means less trips to the geographically distant and slower Dynamic Node (see below). This is similar to what Akamai and other well known firms do, only at a fraction of the cost. However, in this article, and to keep things simple, we will only be caching static files.
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Scooped by
Nicolas Weil
December 14, 2011 4:02 PM
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MPEG DASH - Enabling Formats for Video Streaming over the Open Internet (EBU webinar PDF)
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Scooped by
Nicolas Weil
December 13, 2011 7:27 PM
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Microsoft launches Silverlight 5, keeping a promise for GPU decoding and equality for browser-based applications. Given the added functionality and lengthy formalized support cycle that Microsoft announced at the time of Silverlight 5's launch - the company says it will support the tool until late 2021 - the same pundits might want to take a second look. First, let's look at the functionality. Microsoft announced two key features of Silverlight 5: graphics processing unit (GPU) acceleration for H.264 decoding and the ability for Silverlight to make a direct call to the kernel of the host operating system.
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Scooped by
Nicolas Weil
December 12, 2011 8:03 PM
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... MPEG news from its 98th meeting in Geneva, Switzerland with less than 140 characters and a lot of acronyms. The official press release is, as usual, here. As you can see from the press release, MPEG produced significant results, namely: - MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) ratified - 3D Video Coding: Evaluation of responses to Call for Proposals - MPEG royalty free video coding: Internet Video Coding (IVC) + Web Video Coding (WebVC) - High Efficiency Coding and Media Delivery in Heterogeneous Environments: MPEG-H comprising MMT, HEVC, 3DAC - Compact Descriptors for Visual Search (CDVS): Evaluation of responses to the Call for Proposals - Call for requirements: Multimedia Preservation Description Information (MPDI) - MPEG Augmented Reality (AR) As you can see, a long list of achievements within a single meeting but let's dig inside. For each topic I've also tried to provide some research issues which I think are worth to investigate both inside and outside MPEG.
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Scooped by
Nicolas Weil
December 12, 2011 7:24 PM
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"Gracenote is about to introduce its very own second screen content recognition platform at CES. The company, which became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony three years ago, aims to compete with similar solutions from Yahoo’s IntoNow and social check-in services like Miso and GetGlue."
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Scooped by
Nicolas Weil
December 10, 2011 2:13 AM
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Ensequence and Civolution have announced an automatic content recognition (ACR) product integration to enable the synchronisation of TV content with interactive content on connected devices including tablets and smartphones. The integrated solution consisting of Civolution’s watermarking technology and Ensequence’s iTV Manager platform identifies what viewers are watching on their televisions or PCs and enables programmers and content publishers to create, manage and deliver immersive two-screen experiences for TV shows and commercials. Civolution’s VideoSync – 2nd Screen product allows for the automatic identification of the TV channel being watched and the content being played. Upon identification, it enables accurate time synchronisation between content played on a TV set and supplementary content on a portable device such as a tablet or smartphone. The Ensequence iTV Manager platform enables the creation of the interactive content and handles the timely and synchronous delivery of the content to trigger real-time interactivity. The watermarking technology used for ACR handles distribution delays seamlessly and also supports time-shifted viewing.
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Scooped by
Nicolas Weil
December 10, 2011 1:55 AM
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The mobile video space has begun to consolidate. In early November, Adobe announced it would stop developing its Flash Player for mobile devices (read: Android). Going forward, HTML5 will be the only method to play back video on mobile phones and tablets. This is a big win for Apple, the company to most strongly oppose Flash over the last few years. The company is indeed beginning to dictate the industry’s future. In addition to defeating Flash in the battle for video playback, Apple continues to innovate with its H.264 codec, since WebM is still nowhere to be found. The company has also taken the lead in video streaming. Apple’s homegrown streaming protocol, HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), has always been the one and only way to stream content to iDevices. Now, due to the popularity of iOS, many tool vendors and even competing platforms are starting to support it too.
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Scooped by
Nicolas Weil
December 8, 2011 11:02 PM
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IP streaming technology has advanced significantly over the past decade, as network performance has increased and as new protocols have been used for video delivery. Unfortunately, these improvements have been driven primarily by a few dominant vendors (Apple, Microsoft and Adobe), and they don't interoperate with each other. Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) provides a common, standards-based methodology for delivering video and audio content over a wide variety of IP networks including the Internet. Work on specifying DASH is nearing completion as a standard within the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), the same groups that published the well-known MPEG standards. Final versions of products and systems based on DASH should begin appearing on the market in the near future.
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Scooped by
Nicolas Weil
December 8, 2011 5:22 PM
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ISO/IEC 23009-1, known as MPEG-DASH, has been ratified unanimously by positive votes from 24 national bodies in November 2011. Publication by ISO as an International Standard will take place shortly. MPEG-DASH is the first International Standard for dynamic adaptive streaming of multimedia content over HTTP, based on work previously published by 3GPP. It provides a rich set of features to support on-demand, live streaming and time-shift services. It also supports streaming of multiplexed or independent streams over the existing Internet infrastructure with efficient use of CDNs (Content Delivery Networks). Since it requires only HTTP servers, existing server solutions can be used for large-scale deployment scenarios such as the delivery of TV content over Internet and mobile networks. Several standardization organizations and industry consortia are building on MPEG-DASH in their own specifications.
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Scooped by
Nicolas Weil
December 16, 2011 7:17 AM
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Web Media Live Encoder HD : - encoding in browser via Flash Player up to HD resolution - RTMFP support with P2P player
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Scooped by
Nicolas Weil
December 15, 2011 5:01 PM
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If you produce streaming video in the worship market and have your ear to the ground, you may be experiencing sensory overload right now. HTML5 is being promoted as a panacea for all plug-in-related woes; Adobe threw the mobile market into turmoil by ceasing development of the Flash Player, and there’s a new standard called DASH that supposedly will create a unified approach for adaptive streaming to all connected devices. Seems like getting that sermon out over the Internet has gotten a lot more complicated. Well, maybe not. In this article I’ll describe what’s actually happening with HTML5, Flash, and DASH, and make some suggestions as to how to incorporate these changes into your video-related technology plans.
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Scooped by
Nicolas Weil
December 15, 2011 4:24 PM
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"The biggest advantage to us of a standard like MPEG DASH is that everything can be encoded one way and encapsulated one way, and stored on our CDN servers just once. That's a benefit both in terms of saving our CDN costs from a storage perspective and a benefit because you have greater cache efficiency," said Mark Watson, senior engineer for Netflix.
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Scooped by
Nicolas Weil
December 14, 2011 4:27 PM
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An MPEG meeting in February will further shape the spec as it moves to general adoption. The Motion Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) announced last week that the DASH specification has been ratified as a standards-based way to move forward with dynamically adaptive streaming over the HTTP protocol. The DASH specification was approved by 24 national bodies from across North America, Europe, and parts of Asia. MPEG-DASH, now know as ISO/IEC 23009-1, was frozen technically in August 2011, and ratified by the national bodies prior to MPEG 98 (the 98th meeting of MPEG) held in Geneva, Switzerland, which wrapped up on December 2.
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Scooped by
Nicolas Weil
December 14, 2011 4:10 PM
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ViXS Systems Inc. announced today the support of digital rights management solution (DRM) from the company Widevine on its XCode products. The XCod multimedia processors from ViXS integrate an advanced security architecture allowing the porting of digital rights management (DRM) from companies such as Widevine, a global leader for securing high quality audio and video delivery. The XCod multimedia processor SoCs uniquely combine state-of-the-art ViXS’ patented transcoding and transcrypting technologies providing the ability for place shifting and multiscreen streaming.
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Scooped by
Nicolas Weil
December 14, 2011 2:24 AM
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These days, x264 developers are raising voice against code hijack and disrespect of the GNU GPL licence terms : "Raystream, a recent (and horrifically done) scam company advertised their "amazing proprietary encoding technology", which was of course just x264 on default settings with no modifications.". @videolan TL is giving the temperature : http://bit.ly/tCtkbl / http://bit.ly/vAjlZ3 Raystream, in a rather obscure plea, pretends to extend x264 encoder licenced by CoreCodec and to respect the GNU LGPL licence - but CoreCodec provides only a commercial licence and x264 licence is not LGPL. In a recent press-release ( http://bit.ly/vkuzZZ ), Raystream pretends that an (undisclosed) "independent international property rights management law firm conducted a thorough investigation of Raystream's algorithm and has issued an opinion letter verifying that all aspects of Raystream's software and technology are in complete compliance with the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) held by the Free Software Foundation." but no document or source code is available yet to verify these assumptions. It will be interesting to see if Raystream can provide further evidence of the fact that they are strictly respecting x264 GPL licence terms and that they don't have to contribute back their potential code modifications to x264 codebase.
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Scooped by
Nicolas Weil
December 12, 2011 8:06 PM
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Raystream Inc. announced that a free trial of its HD video compression service will be available to any business offering HD video content online beginning Friday, December 16, 2011. Raystream's proprietary video compression technology drastically decreases the file size of HD videos -- up to 90 percent, with an average of approximately 70 percent -- with no loss in the quality or crystal clarity for which HD video is known.
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Scooped by
Nicolas Weil
December 12, 2011 7:57 PM
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How can companies that create video content make sure it remains salable for many years to come? By future-proofing it. Read on to learn how to keep your content fresh and your files accessible. Creating content is a major investment for any company, no matter what business you’re in. The investment is only paid back by selling the content to distributors and consumers. The more times and ways in which this content can be sold — audio, video, multi-media — the better the return on investment (ROI). And this ROI can be improved if these sales can be carried well into the future, not just for a short window of 2 or 3 months. Logically, the longer content is attractive, relevant, and accessible to potential buyers, the more money it can make. For content producers, this leads to a critically important question: How can they future-proof their content so that it remains accessible and salable for years to come?
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Scooped by
Nicolas Weil
December 11, 2011 7:12 AM
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Viewers and producers both seek a more realistic viewing experience from cinema and television systems. There are several ways to make the television more immersive. Three paths that are being followed include increasing the field of view, adding depth perception and improving motion rendition. Producers look to maintain the value of their investments into the future. We already see SD channels commissioning HD programming with a eye on the future. New formats like S3D are gaining a niche following among viewers, but Super HiVision — 4K and 8K — is going to set a new benchmark for video quality.
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Scooped by
Nicolas Weil
December 10, 2011 1:56 AM
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MPEG announced today it is working on a royalty-free MPEG standard in two tracks, one track based on expired MPEG patents and other royalty free technologies and the other based on a proposal that patent holders grant a royalty-free license to a “constrained baseline profile” of the widely used AVC/h.264 standard. According to the MPEG press release, “Depending on the progress of the two tracks, MPEG will decide, in 2012, whether to choose IVC or WebVC to become an International Standard.” Given the heavy hitters that are lining up behind these proposals and the significance of the forum of ISO and the MPEG committee, it is worth looking deeper at the public information that has been released on these proposals.
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Scooped by
Nicolas Weil
December 8, 2011 11:08 PM
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Trying to free the web of proprietary plugins is a noble goal to which we are committed. But it would be dishonest to strip people of the interactivity they have gotten used to, if we have no acceptable solution to offer them in exchange. Technology such as Flash can evolve very quickly. With the recent announcement of Flash being discontinued on mobile devices (as a plugin, but still present in Air applications), I don’t think anybody saw the seamless quality transition feature coming. I certainly didn’t. Yet, it is so very easy to come up with a new cool feature when you are on your own, not having to reach consensus with a big group of companies having sometimes misaligned interests. How long until such a feature hits HTML5 audio and video? From where we are standing, it feels like forever. The W3C Audio Working group is experiencing difficulties. Scarce meetings (if any), decisions being made internally by companies disregarding the opinions of the working group, unwillingness to let individual developers express themselves… In the end, if no big company is interested in the same feature as you, individual developer, what can you do? For the time being, not much.
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Scooped by
Nicolas Weil
December 8, 2011 5:32 PM
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Does this all-in-one video mixer have what it takes to stream your next event? We put the robust TriCaster TCXD850 Extreme to the test in this exhaustive review. NewTek’s TriCaster all-in-one video mixers have a long history in portable live production (we reviewed our first TriCaster back in 2006). But in recent years, the ability to both stream and record a live production has pushed the TriCaster into the next level of live productions. As part of that push, NewTek has introduced a series of rack-mounted TriCasters, the TCXD series, with the first and most robust being the TriCaster TCXD850 Extreme (TCXD850X).
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