Streaming Learning Center

Today, Livestream announced that all tiers of service on the new Livestream platform will be available on a completely ad-free basis immediately, including the free version. The company also pre-announced a new tier of service that will enable of live stream embedding, with pricing and features to be revealed within the next few weeks. Finally, Livestream announced the availability of a new version of its Livestream for Producers iPhone app that enables users to create an account directly from the app. This lets users download and immediately start live streaming.

When you configure a group of adaptive streaming files, you produce some files at relatively low data rates. With these files, you have several options to preserve quality, including lowering the resolution, the frame rate or both. Lower resolutions preserve frame quality but can look pixelated when scaled for display. Higher resolutions avoid scaling artifacts, but frame quality can suffer. Dropping the frame rate preserves smoothness, but drops frame quality.

If you click over to the main article, you'll be able to see the same source video encoded at 5 configurations, all to 300 kbps (2pass VBR restricted to 120% of target data rate). These are:

• 640x480x15 fps
• 640x480x30 fps
• 400x300x15 fps
• 320x240x15 fps
• 320x240x30 fps

Have a look and see which one looks best, and if you have a strong opinion, let us know via a comment.

On Monday, Sorenson Media announced the immediate availability of Sorenson Squeeze Premium for $1,995. What is it and how does it fit into the Squeeze Product family?

Yesterday Livestream announced the $8,500 Studio HD500, a luggable portable computer with five HD/SD SDI inputs and five video outputs with software providing real-time preview for all inputs, transitions, DDR playback, graphics overlay and a full audio mixer. You can read all about the new unit here. Our reading of the specs and press materials left us with several questions that company co-founder and CEO Max Haot was kind enough to answer via email. Without further ado, here they are.

In separate announcements at IBC, Brightcove announced two new products from its recent acquisition of Zencoder -- Instant Play and LIve Cloud Transcoding -- and the availability of Widevine DRM encryption and packaging within its Video Cloud platform. All three announcements are significant, although they impact different market segments.

So there I was, a chapter due on my next book on live streaming, and a column due for Streaming Media. Which to tackle first, I pondered.

The streaming media encoding universe has evolved into a complex space with multiple, often intersecting markets. In this overview article, I'll identify the most critical market segments and discuss one or two key products within each market.

Quality control software has been around for a while now; for an overview of the category and quick look at four entrants, check out "Quality Control Roundup: Catch the Mistakes Before They Go Live." Producing files for adaptive streaming throws some new wrinkles into the mix, however, both from a format and a management perspective. One of the first products that attempts to simplify QC for adaptive streams is Venera Technologies' Pulsar, which now can analyze adaptive streams produced for HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and Smooth Streaming, but not HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS). In this review I take a look at Pulsar as a whole, with a focus on these new adaptive streaming-related capabilities.