Media RSS

Media RSS is an RSS 2.0 module proposed by Yahoo!
Adopted by Adobe Media Player and YouTube among others.

infrastructure

Interesting (geek) read
http://facebook.com/note.php?note_id=39391378919
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers

How iPlayer will become our player for your friends

Interesting article from Guardian about the BBC's iPlayer.

http://guardian.co.uk/media/2008/dec/11/interview-anthony-rose-iplayer

[...] But rich content means heavy demands on bandwidth: along with other BBC Flash content, the BBC iPlayer now accounts for almost 10% of UK internet bandwidth at peak time, says Rose. That figure is likely to increase, as the BBC adds better device support and more features. "We're going to add HD [video], we're going to add podcasts, we're going to add a delivery notification system. You'll see a system tray pop-up: Top Gear, next episode now out."
And who will pay for all that data transfer? You will. Rose has little patience with ISPs that complain the BBC is consuming too much bandwidth. "It's a profit centre. There is a huge opportunity for ISPs to sell people the packages they really want to get a great iPlayer experience." [...]

And if you want to learn more about the iPlayer:
http://guardian.co.uk/media/iplayer

Streaming Media Monitoring Services

Are there other ones out there I should be looking at besides Gomez and Keynote?

http://gomez.com/products/streaming.php

http://keynote.com/products/voip_and_streaming/streaming_performance/streaming_perspective.html

Gomez Launches New Streaming Media Monitoring Service
Monday, September 22, 2008
http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2008/09/gomez-launches.html

How Is CDNs Network Performance For Streaming Measured?
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2007/08/cdns-network-pe.html

IBM : Resource library

So much to read. So little free time.
IBM : Industries : Media and entertainment : Resource library
http://www-03.ibm.com/industries/media/us/list/resource/all/

iPhones, FStream and the Death of Satellite Radio

Interesting read.
Mostly a criticism on satellite radio but they talk about streaming radio as well,
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/entertainment/08/11/30/1458232.shtml

Google Audio Indexing

That is kewl!
http://labs.google.com/gaudi

The speech research group at Google has developed its own speech recognition system (called GAudi, for Google Audio Indexing) [...]

youtube.com/live

Since I have no life, I had nothing better to do Saturday night than to watch YouTube Live.

If you didn't know already, November 22, 2208 at 8:00 PM Youtube streamed their first live event. A show featuring mostly Youtube stars doing their thing live.

Once again, thank you Dan Rayburn for putting things in perspective.

http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2008/11/youtubes-live-event-as-overhyped-as-the-company.html

RTMP live streaming from:

• Akamai : main CDN (primary and secondary)
• Highwinds : backup CDN (tertiary)

this means they where using:
Flash Media Streaming Server

Low, mid and high quality. Anyone figured out the exact bitrates?

Anyone knows the technical details of this webcast? I'm especially interested in knowing more about the encoding gear they used. 

Not one, not two, but THREE program feeds (on stage, back stage and off stage) that you could select whenever you felt like it.

Web page hosted on:
live.youtube.digitaria.com
Does anyone know about the relationship between Google and Digitaria?

They (obviously) are using the very popular SWFObject now hosted as a Google Code project
http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/
Of course since Geoff Stearns (the guy who wrote it) is now working at YouTube.

http://blog.deconcept.com/about/

The guy on the profanity delay missed Bo Burnham signing the words "shit loads of money". America must have been so offended... Fortunately they corrected the mistake on the on demand clip.

The Visualizing Akamai page showed a peak for live streams over 950K. That close to one million concurrent live streams (picture me doing Dr. Evil here). Of course Akamai streamed other live content at that time but lets agree that the vast majority of it was YouTube's.
http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/dataviz3.html

interesting to see who gave money for this:

• a big movie company
• a video game
• a flight company
• a camcorder
• special thanks to a large PC vendor

P2P streaming

European Broadcasting Union (EBU) recommends P2P streaming
http://octoshape.com/press/press.asp?press=id081107_EBU&xml=news

Strangely enough, they do not insist on:

• You need administrator access (which most corporate users don’t have) to install Octoshape plug-in on your computer.
• Your firewall must be configured to let Octoshape plug-in through.
• ISPs do bandwidth throttling to restrict P2P applications
• You are basically asking your end-users to use the bandwidth they pay for so you can save money
• content producers are reluctant to have their content distributed through end-users computers

Elsewhere in that EBU Technical Review:

Several users had problems with downloading the Octoshape plug-in. Some people, particularly those located in large corporations (including some large broadcasting organizations) could not download the plug-in at all, and consequently were not able to access the Portal services.

These EBU tests cannot be considered rigorous scientific tests. They were more akin to “proof of concept” and “experience-gathering” evaluations. Octoshape is not the only commercial P2P system available in the market but we selected it because our previous experience with this system was positive.

Does anyone know what is the relationship between Octoshape and EBU? What’s the credibility of this “technical review”?

Go read the full EBU Technical Review and make sure you do a search for the keyword “firewall”. It’s surprising to say the least that this issue isn’t even mentioned.

EBU P2P Technical trial of the media portal
http://tech.ebu.ch/docs/techreview/trev_2008-Q3_EBU-P2P-Portal.pdf

It seems that Octoshape has been lobbying with EBU for a few years.
Introducing Octoshape a new technology for large-scale streaming over the Internet
http://tech.ebu.ch/docs/techreview/trev_303-octoshape.pdf

At the Streaming Media West 2008 conference I attended a panel where questions were asked about P2P to Limelight and EdgeCast.

http://streamingmedia.com/videos/?bcpid=1344652039&bclid=1815835914&bctid=1845377650
(from 41:00)
Phil Goldsmith (COO, SVP Sales, EdgeCast Networks)
Paul Alfieri (Limelight Networks) : “Our customers are not asking for P2P and it’s mainly a security issue.”
It gets even more interesting as Dan Rayburn jumped in at the end of the debate (53:20).

You can disagree with me but I felt like showing the flip side of the coin.

Live UGC update

A while back I posted a few notes about Live UGC.
http://philpatrice.blogspot.com/2008/07/live-ugc.html

I've had the chance to meet with Arjun Saksena, Yahoo's Sr. Product Manager, Video Platform at the latest Streaming Media West conference in San José. Arjun is always surprised to see the enthusiasm that this Yahoo! Live experiment generates without any real advertisement.
http://live.yahoo.com

This week Yahoo! announced they would can their Live project.
http://yliveblog.com/blog/2008/11/03/stopping-our-broadcast/

I guess they haven't been able to figure out any real business model around it.

A Nightmare on Email Street

I haven't posted in a long time!
So lets break the silence with an old news that is not relevant with this blog's focus...

http://portfolio.com/news-markets/top-5/2008/02/05/Eli-Lilly-E-Mail-to-New-York-Times

http://nytimes.com/2008/01/30/business/30cnd-drug.html

I just bring this one out every time a colleague of mine sends an e-mail to the wrong person because of e-mail address auto complete.

Going back to school

iTunes U
http://deimos3.apple.com/indigo/main/main.xml
You need to have iTunes installed for this URL to work properly as it links to a section in the iTunes Store.

YouTube EDU
http://youtube.com/edu

MIT OpenCourseWare
http://ocw.mit.edu

NPR Open API

This is exciting stuff. I sure hope other radio broadcasters will embrace this Open API.

NPR looks to developers for help distributing shows
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-9993420-93.html

What NPR wants is for developers to help make it easier to share its content on Web sites and blogs, including those owned by the 860 NPR member stations.
[...]
"This launch represents one of the first comprehensive Open APIs introduced by a major national media organization"

I'm eager to learn more with what they will present this week at OSCON.
http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/detail/3366

UPDATE: woah! Go check it out:
http://npr.org/api/

Video Captionning

update: YouTube Video Captions
http://help.youtube.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=100079

Nothing super new here but interesting stuff from Google.

Google's Video Captionning
http://video.google.com/videocaptioned

Subtitles Search only closed captioned videos
http://video.google.com/videoadvancedsearch

How do I enter captions or subtitles for my video?
http://video.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=26577

Google supports the following captionning formats:

SubRip
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubRip

SubViewer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubViewer

YouTube Video Annotations
http://youtube.com/t/annotations_about

What are video annotations?
http://help.youtube.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=92709

kewl examples:

Magic Card Trick
http://youtube.com/watch?v=tbEei0I3kMQ

Interactive Shell Game
http://youtube.com/watch?v=SzEvcS01Cl0

My 22nd Skydive
http://youtube.com/watch?v=GM02Hejw02s

Object/Embed Start Playing From Current Frame

Just in case you haven’t seen this yet.
A neat little feature about Viddler. It allows you to share its video clips with object/embed code (nothing new here). It gives the user the option to Start Playing From Current Frame. Kewl.
http://viddler.com

Live UGC

It seems to me like more and more ventures are trying to surf the social networking wave with live UGC.
http://live.yahoo.com
http://justin.tv
http://ustream.tv
http://kyte.tv
http://qik.com
http://selfcast.com
http://flixwagon.com
http://comvu.com
http://mogulus.com
http://operator11.com

reporter : When are you guys gonna do live video on YouTube ?
Steve Chen : 2008

BBC Radio Usage

Interesting numbers from a very large webcaster. BBC Radio has committed to releasing monthly figures detailing the performance of its online sites and services.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/siteusage/

Real Ripper

Interesting follow up article about this questionable feature introduced in RealPlayer a year ago.
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/06/16/1420233.shtml

[...]its real impact will be not on piracy but on the perceived legitimacy of ripping programs.

Codecs vs. Container Formats

I'm fed up with people mixing up the concepts of codec and container format. I've seen that mistake so many times and not just from newbies. Whitepapers written by large companies (names intentionally omitted here) carry that confusion.

For example, VP6, VC-1 and H.264 are codecs.

MP4, MOV, AVI, ASF and FLV are examples of container formats.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_format_(digital)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codecs

I will gladly help anyone who needs a hand trying to use those terms correctly.

nextMEDIA, Banff, June 6-8, 2008

This weekend I had the chance to attend the nextMEDIA conference in the magnificent Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel.

So on my way to a session room on Sunday morning I walk across Leila Boujnane, CEO, Idée Inc..

Phil : Leila!
Leila (intrigued) : Yes?
P : You went to the Milia in Cannes a while back?
L : I believe so but it was a long time ago.
P : Indeed. 10 years ago, my masters' thesis won the Milia's Young Talent contest and they invited me to present it in Cannes. I was a broke grad student having the time of his life. You and I met there and you bought me a sandwich.

I know I'm not the only delegate at the nextMEDIA who was extremely impressed by the technology your company develops.
Thank you Leila.

VLC Port to Neuros Linux

I'm eager to see what this device will be capable of. 

http://open.neurostechnology.com/content/vlc-porting-neuros-open-internet-television-hdplatform

[...]porting will be carried out in phases, from basic multimedia platform bring up, to full playback and full recording support, with complete system integration done in Q3 of 2008[...]

HE-AAC Perceived quality

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HE-AAC#Perceived_quality

[…] Scientific testing by the European Broadcasting Union has indicated that HE-AAC at 48 kbit/s was ranked as "Excellent" quality using the MUSHRA scale. MP3 in the same testing received a score less than half that of HE-AAC and was ranked "Poor" using the MUSHRA scale. Data from this testing also indicated that some individuals confused 48 kbit/s encoded material with an uncompressed original.[…]

EBU subjective listening test on low-bit rate audio codecs

(Figure 8, page 15/45)

Results for 48 kbit/s stereo

http://ebu.ch/CMSimages/en/tec_doc_t3296_tcm6-10497.pdf

StreamingMedia East 2008

Tomorrow and Wednesday I’ll be attending the StreamingMedia East conference in New York City. It will be my fourth SME and it gets better every year. I’m eager to see this year’s show. Go check out the program.

If you’re touring the show floor, come visit my colleagues at our booth. I’ll try and post as much notes from the conferences as I can.

If you cannot make it but are interested in knowing more about a particular presentation, add your questions as a comment and I`ll do my best to ask them to the relevant speakers.

Although I’ll be in the City for less than 48 hours, I’ll try to see some old friends. I miss that city so much.

Don’t Build a Stupid Product Roadmap!

http://tynerblain.com/blog/2008/04/28/dont-build-a-stupid-product-roadmap/

There is value to your customers in knowing your roadmap.

[...]

There is value to your team in knowing your roadmap.

[...]

Just make sure you don’t become a slave to an old roadmap. Keep it current. Use it to chart your course. And when your course changes, update your roadmap.

Online Video Advertising Standards Are Set by the IAB

Old news but still interesting.

http://www.beet.tv/2008/05/rejoice-online.html

[…]There is still more work to be done in the standardization of online video advertising including pricing the value of engagement.[…]

[…]For the ad agencies and publishers, the challenge is how to keep content relevant.[…]

Digital Video Ad Format Guidelines and Best Practices

http://iab.net/media/file/IAB_Ad_Format_Guidelines_Pub_Com_Final.pdf

Digital Video In-Stream Ad Metrics Definitions

http://iab.net/dv_metrics_definitions

Developed by the IAB Digital Video Committee

http://iab.net/member_center/35088?iabid=a0330000000s0p4AAA

NAB 2008

I'm currently in the Las Vegas airport waiting for my flight back home. I am exhausted. At this year's NAB, StreamTheWorld (my employer) had two booths. A rather small one in the radio section located in the Las Vegas Convention Center's North Hall and a larger one in the Lower South Hall. I spent the majority of my time at either one of our booths but also had some time to visit a lot of the show.
I met with so many people and so many companies that I will have to brake it down into several posts.
For now we have to do the follow ups... so many follow ups.
Next show : Streaming Media East in New York City (YAY, I get to go to my favorite city in the whole world)

Hello World!

Today is the day I start blogging. Bear with me while I do the usual first ego post. It is not every day that one looses his blogger virginity.
What about this blog?
Well a friend of mine, Martin Lessard convinced me to start blogging through a chapter he wrote in the excellent book Pourquoi Bloguer? (why blog?). This gave me the kick in the butt to get off mine and start sharing my thoughts and ideas with the world.
The pessimistic in me is yelling "why would anyone care?". The answer is maybe that indeed no one cares about what I have to write. But if I don't try it, I will never know.
You will probably notice that English is not my first language. French is. I however decided to not write using my mother tongue for a few practical reasons.
First, reach. The majority of people I hope will read my posts speak English.
Second, it will force me to hopefully improve my second language. Living in Montreal I don't get much chance to practice.
So here I go. Please forgive any mistake I might commit. I will learn and improve both the style and relevance of my posts over time.