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