Streaming Learning Center

Today (May 22, 2013), I presented a session at Streaming Media East in Manhattan on Choosing an Enterprise Encoder. Click over to the main article to download the presentation materials.

I presented on this topic this morning (May 21, 2013) at Streaming Media East in Manhattan. Here's the summary:

This session starts by detailing the playback specs for all iDevices, old and new. Then you'll learn the strategies used by prominent iTunes publishers to serve the complete range of installed iDevices. Next, the seminar switches to cellular wireless delivery, with a technical description of Apple's HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), including recommendations for the number of streams and Apple's encoding parameters. You'll walk away knowing how to encode for both iTunes and mobile delivery to iOS and compatible devices.

Click over to the main article to download the presentation.

Tomorrow I host a seminar at Streaming Media East entitled Encoding for Multiscreen Delivery. Click over to the article to read a description and download the handout.

I was the opening act for NAB 2013, speaking at at 8:00 AM on Saturday morning for the Society of Broadcast Engineers (SBE). The talk was on Producing for Multiple Screen Delivery and a surprisingly enthusiastic group of around 300+ broadcast engineers showed up despite the hour (you can download the handout below). Not to boast, but I'll share a post-talk email from John Poray, the Executive Director of the SBE, who stated, "Our thanks to you! You provided a great opening for our programming. Tough to get people out at 8 am on a Saturday in LV but you garnered the largest opening crowd we’ve had since we started doing this in 1995."

Click over the main article to download the handout.

In March, I visited Moscow to speak at the Connected TV Forum. You can read about the trip and download the handouts by clicking over to the main article.

H.265/High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the successor codec to H.264, which, like H.264, is jointly developed by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group and ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG). The primary goal of the new codec is 50 percent better compression efficiency than H.264 and support for resolutions up to 8192x4320.

Live event streaming while on the road requires an encoder that's as powerful as it is portable. In this Buyer's Guide, I'll detail the categories to consider when buying a portable encoder, along with factors to consider to help identify the best product for your needs. Specially, I'll discuss software encoders, portable hardware encoders, and on-camera encoders, though exclusively for Ethernet or Wi-Fi transmission, as cellular models are covered in another Buyer's Guide.

Is 2013 the year of encoding in the cloud? Actually, it might be, at least for live transcoding in the cloud, and even on-demand transcoding should see significant migration to cloud facilities.

Choosing a live streaming encoding tool used to be simple: You typically would encode a single stream for delivery to your desktop viewers, and budget was the most important buying criteria. When buying today, of course, you've almost certainly expanded your target viewers to include both mobile and desktop clients, with adaptive streaming preferred over single file delivery.

Many streaming producers are increasing the number of mobile and over-the-top (OTT) platforms that they support while implementing adaptive streaming to enhance the viewing experience on each. There are two ways to accomplish this: produce a unique set of streams for each target, or derive one smaller group of files that will effectively serve all platforms. In this How-To article, I'll explore the latter approach.