NetSpeak

I took the 5 hour drive  to the NAB  Conference in Las Vegas and spent the day with our CTO, Matt Kotich, Wednesday April 14th. Was it worth it? You bet.  My goal was to look for new tools, services, and tips that our streaming customers could benefit from.  I looked forward to connecting face-to-face with our virtual alliance partners, Digital Rapids and Mobile Media Devices.

My personal thanks to Brent Ross and the Digital Rapids team along with Darryl Spangler of Mobile Media Devices and it was great meeting them.  When a company looks for a relationship with another company they look at how well they support not only their customers but their channel. Digital Rapids does both extremely well.

D-R (Digital Rapids)  has recently announced and embraced the IPhone and other Smart Phones streaming challenges. It uses a progressive http Get from any CDN (HighWinds from YourHost.com).

D-R has made the codec that will accommodate VOD streaming to IPhones.  Using the Touch Stream system you need to make profiles for 4 files to for each speed and phone type and your good.  It is adaptive technology. This format includes a solution for the IPad which actually has a higher resolution to accommodate the larger and Hi res screen.

The Touch Stream Live Streaming box is a great tool and companies and groups are choosing this tool in as a cost effective alternative to the Stream Z , which is an awesome box, not portable.  They choose the TS system in order to cover the ability to be portable or to have the ability to be portable as their needs evolved in the future.

In the D-R booth, I watched many people who appeared to have a good grasp on video and broadcasting, struggling to grasp the basic streaming concepts and implementations of projects, bobs, and various streaming parameters that are available when setting up streams.  If you are familiar with Sorenson Squeeze, it will be a breeze to grasp.  This tells me that the field is wide open and the public need companies like the Official Digital Rapids VAR (Value Added Reseller) like MobileMediaDevices to consult and sell Touch Stream systems, to Digital Rapids for post sales support, and YourHost.com to connect the dots, providing the user-Friendly, world-wide peering CDN self-administered publishing points, tools, and support.  YourHost.com being a Christian owned and operated company, and when it comes to streaming we offer our services to many different venues but our prime streaming focus is on Christian related organizations.

I have reviewed some of the other streaming systems and tools out their and found tools Digital Rapids to be a solid choice for All of our CDN customers.  I did like the authoring tools that TriCaster had to offer but the tools and GUI were a little more difficult to the non technical user.

Sorenson Media, Inc. was there showing off their encoding Streaming tools.  I had the pleasure of briefly chating with, Cathryne Conner,  the Direct Sales Representative and a support resource.  Cathryne showed me some of their Squeeze encoding products and how one can make post production modifications with their Squeeze product.

We use and Highly recommend Sorenson products to our customers when encoding for CDN VOD streaming content.   With all the time an organization spends producing content, it is critical to use the right encoding tool.  I cannot tell you how many times a customer calls or writes and tells us there content is not streaming as smooth and as clear as they would like to find out that they used a free encoding software and underrated hardware to make the streaming files.

On the Move Event Tools -

I ran into two very nice gentlemen from Canada represeting Dejero Labs. They had a an amazing tool that is revolutionizing how people are remote broadcast quality news.

I only had a few minutes with these guys between shoots and  I met Ovidiu Frusina and his partner whom I did not get his name (sorry), of Dejero Labs, Inc.  Ovidiu’s partner was the key person that gave me the overview and highlights of their product.

In layman’s terms, they have a software-Hardware combination that basically eliminates the need for the Big TV News Truck.

They have found a way to grab any and all phone services where ever they are and bind or combine or “Teather” them to the to create an acceptable pipe to stream live or broadcast from anywhere in broadcast quality.

This means that one can stream anywhere there are multi-carrier cell phone services.  Picture the multiple phone services as an 2 to 10 lane plus highway and each highway represents a part of the bandwidth that you need. I.E. Each phone line of a 5 phone carrier choice may represent 150k each and the Dejero system can recognize all 5 and bring the mobile broadcast team a combined 750 k stream!

The software will allow the user drop and add services on-the-fly as they are moving so they not miss or drop content for the most part as I understand it.

In the 2010 Olympics torch run, the Dejero team was the only camera team that was able to follow the 1,000 mile Olympic “carrying of the torch” in Canada, where others could not get a strong enough signal.  The system sits in a highly modified Pelican case that was put in the trunk of a Toyota Tercel during the 2010 Olympic torch run. You only need the case and a camera and your ready to stream or broadcast your content.

Dejero is changing the way events are run and covered.

The other area that impressed me was the exponential progression “Green Screen” video production that is now becoming affordable for the “Pro Sumer” user at reasonable costs.

At the end of the day we ran into one of our great hosted Ecommerce customers, EZupDirect.com.

They showed me a great “Transformer”-type table that is very versatile. I understand the design of this cool product was the brain child of CEO Mark Carter of EZup International was the  See the photos below.

There was many other items that we reviewed but these stood out the most.