Streaming Learning Center

Microsoft Silverlight has been very noticably used by NBC (Olympics/Sunday Night Football), but never achieved the penetration necessary for smaller businesses to adopt it. The thing is, while the sizzle behind Silverlight has always been video (as with Flash), the steak has always been Rich Internet Applications, and more specifically, the tools that developers use to build them. In my view, that's the primary reason that Silverlight exists.

Now, Microsoft is de-emphasizing Silverlight in favor of HTML5. This will have very little impact in the streaming video marketplace, but you don't need C#, .NET or Visual Basic to build HTML5 apps. So where does that leave developers?

So there I was, struggling for an idea for a column, and editor Stephen Nathans-Kelly mentioned that there was growing interest in distributing HD wedding videos to clients over the internet. Fortunately, this dovetailed well with some research that I recently performed, so here we are. If you’re considering distributing some or all of your wedding or event-related content over the internet in HD, you need to ask yourself at least four questions.

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Google recently open-sourced the VP8 codec for video on the web (for the key facts on this development, see Tim Siglin's latest Streamline column). Should you care? Not so much, I'd say; Google's recent launch of VP8 reminded me of a couple of theories that I hold dear, one current, one from long ago. The current one is that past performance is no guarantee of future success, though unfortunately, in many instances, past performance will at least let you step up to the plate for future at-bats.

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As part of my First Looks review of VP8 and WebM for StreamingMedia.com, ran a bunch of VP8 and H.264 comparisons, initially using the MainConcept H.264 codec, since that's the codec included with Sorenson Squeeze, which I used to produce the VP8 files. Then, I added some comparison files produced using the x264 codec, encoding via the QuickTime-based x264Encoder version 1.2.13 (dated 6/27/2010). 

You can read the StreamingMedia article here. In this article, I present the frame comparisons that were too big to fit in the StreamingMedia article, plus present URLs for the streaming files that I created and compared. 

Fifty-seven percent of organizations that deliver video online are supporting the iPad, or will be by the end of 2010. That's one of the many compelling findings in a new survey-based report from StreamingMedia.com called Supporting the iPad and HTML5—Timing, Motivation, Costs, and Scope, which provides details the plans of 1,147 survey respondents regarding support for the iPad, the HTML5 video tag, and a variety of mobile devices. The report also provides implementation data like content and monetization plans, development budgets, and feature sets, enabling report buyers to make better-informed decisions about the timing, scope, and costs of their own iPad and HTML5-related implementations. Further, the report breaks down all responses by demographic category: organization type, annual revenue, target market, and size of video library.

I gave a talk at StreamingMedia East in New York City earlier this month to a group of business executives assembled by California-based webcasting solution provider MediaPlatform. I was told that the execs were interested in "future directions of online video," so I put together a talk entitled "In Your Chair, I'd Be Asking Myself ..." The talk covered three main questions, Is my video competitive?, Am I reaching all my target viewers?, and Am I investing wisely? Click above to read the article.

MIX10 is the annual Microsoft event for web developers and designers, and the big news from this year's conference was expanded HTML5 support in Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), including support for the audio and video tags. Basically, this means that when IE9 ships (Microsoft didn't announce a ship date), it will play video without a plug-in such as Flash or Silverlight. How? Like all of the HTML5-compatible browsers, IE9 will supply its own codecs to play video files. For most readers, this rates a big yawn, but HTML5 is something you need to know about-even if it's just to conclude that it probably won't be important in the near term.

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I recently reviewed ten case-study videos on the Internet to choose one to review for StreamingMedia.com, and my review of that video will appear soon. I evaluated multiple factors in choosing a winner, including marketing focus, visual and audio quality, player presentation and encoded configuration. The clear winner in my mind was a case study produced by network security vendor Watchguard Technologies. The case study featured their client, the Burlington Public Library, and was memorable for multiple reasons that I detail in the review, among them the stunning video quality shown below. To watch the case study on YouTube, click here.