Brightcove VS. Windows Media, kinda like a Gorilla VS. an Orangoutang

Streaming video over the Internet is nothing new.

Back in the prehistoric mid 90’s a company called Progressive Network (you may know them now as Real Networks) launched a product called Real Audio.

In addition to streaming audio over the Internet, Real Audio allowed content creators to stream live video over the web. You could say that in 1995, when the first video was streamed live over the Internet that the battle over streaming video had begun.

Enter Windows Media and Brightcove, the two giant gorillas in the room.

Although I would have to say that Windows Media looks more like a strange orangoutang than a fierce mountain gorilla.

Let me explain.

The Brightcove platform allows content distributors to broadcast content, both short and long, over the INternet to paying or non-paying subscribers. While streaming video, the content provider has the option of dropping targeted advertising into the video stream. These ads can be changed easily, allowing the broadcaster using Brightcove to sell ad space in a very flexible manner. All content broadcast over the Brightcove platform is Flash encoded, meaning that the content will most likely be viewable by anyone who wants to see it. At the moment Flash Player market penetration is around 92%

When you land at the Brightcove page you are immediately offered multiple resources, case studios and educational videos to help you integrate Brightcove into your media strategy. The website is clean and concise, and really focus on how Brightcove can help you make money with your content by distribution and tracking that content effectively.

All in all, Brightcove appears to be on the bleeding edge in the streaming media market. Very impressive.

Windows media, on the other hand, is quite a different animal.

Sticking to the closed garden mentality that pervades Microsoft, Windows Media player has evolved over the years to be primarily a Windows-centric technology.

Unlike the Flash platform, Windows Media does not have great market penetration. With the announcement of Silverlight, Microsoft’s new streaming media technology, Microsoft seems to be reaching out to the huddles masses who don’t have a Windows PC. Lucky us eh? But in my opinion this move comes many years too late. Flash has taken over the web and is as ubiquitous as the Windows OS is to the majority of the world’s computers.

But I digress. Enough about the technology.

The real problem with the Windows Media platform is the Windows Media website.

What a confusing mess.

If I were to look through the Windows Media website as a content provider, I would be:

1. confused

2. confused, ‘How many pages must I look through to get a sense of this thing?!’

3. confused, ‘How do I make money with this? Is this web site for engineers or something?!’

4. confused, ‘What the hell is Silverlight, what about Windows Media Player? What??!! Flash has most of the market?! Why did I waste my time!’

You get the picture.

So in the end, I could say that Windows Media is a bit of a silly orangoutang.

Going to their website I am led around in circles as to what exactly Windows Media can do for my business, why I should go with a dated technology with low market penetration.

On the other hand, after a few minutes spent surfing around the Brightcove website, I am inspired. In the first few minutes at Brightcove, I am given a multitude of reasons how I will make money with Brightcove as well as reach a cross platform, cross browser audience. Instead of re-inventing the wheel (Silverlight, anyone?) Brightcove sticks with Flash, and focuses it’s energy towards what really matters: distribution and a solid ad revenue strategy.

Quite a strong, silent gorilla of a company, one that is sure of what it is and what it is supposed to do.

My Experience with DRM (Digital Rights Management): what works & what doesn’t

In my short 30 years on the planet Earth, I have thought about DRM for only a small percentage of my time here.

That percentage of time is neatly summarized below for attention deficient disorder Internet surfers:

1996: Damn! When did CD’s start costing $18??!

1999: Hold on guys, I’ll join you all at the party once I get my huge Napster download started…

2001: Kirk: “Hmmm…so you’re saying I can buy *ANY* CD or software program for a dollar?”

Thai street vendor: “Yes! Sure! Only a dollar! They are same same but different!”

Kirk: “Wicked.”

2004: Where’d the free Napster go? They got busted?!! Oh well, I have XM radio now as well as Musicmatch.

2007: Pandora and Last.fm rock!! For the long distance driving I still have XM, and by golly, 99 cents for a song from iTunes sounds reasonable to me!

2008-Present: Currently listening to Last.fm, while I charge my iPhone loaded with free podcasts, ripped DVD’s and my entire music collection. No need for XM now that I can use my iPhone in my car. I can also stream Pandora all the time from my iPhone for free, so no need to buy much music anymore.

Ain’t life grand?

All in all, I find that the traditional model of music distribution:

artist–>record label–>store–>consumer

Has been completely subverted by cheap and easy media distribution to form a new model:

artist–>Internet–>consumer

Or perhaps even:

artist–>consumer–>artist–>consumer

These are strange times we live in, but I believe it all started when millions like myself said:

“$18 dollars for a CD with only 1-3 songs I actually want, distributed on a totally fragile medium (bare CD’s) that scratch easily?”

Cm’on!!!

-Kirk

The Rise and Fall of Quicktime and the Spiders from Apple

It’s a reference to the David Bowie album “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” and I think it suits the subject I will expound on: the rise and fall of Quicktime.

Once upon a time there were three behemoth video players known as Real, Windows Media Player and Quicktime.

These three video viewing programs controlled the way that people viewed video content on the web.

Most of the time, when you clicked on a web video, you had one of the three above mentioned programs open up an external window and ever so slowly load the video requested.

Let me back up a minute.

Actually most of us we were presented with a screen before the video content, a screen that demanded that we should download such and such an upgrade, or that a particular codec was missing and that we needed to scour the web, find the missing codec, and install it into the video viewing program that was having problems.

For a while people put up with this and over time Quicktime became a leader in video delivery. Apple fanboys celebrated Quicktime as the ‘de facto’ video player, and the Quicktime format soon rose to the top much like Ziggy Stardust.

Enter the Flash Video Player in spring of 2005.

With the introduction of the Flash Video Player across a wide swath of the internet market, people who designed web sites could now embed video *into* their designs rather than have a separate video player/window open up and obscure the wonderful web page that the web designer had worked so hard on.

Cool! Video was now being treated as *content* and not as a separate widget like thing that required nerves of steel and the patience of saint. (Patience while the video loads that is.)

The second part of what made Flash the dominate video codec/player was the fact that it only required a quick simple, in browser install. (Did I also mention that the Flash player would work in ANY browser on ANY type of computer?)

Within 16 months, Flash Video had dethroned the once mighty behemoth known as Quicktime along with the other two formats, Windows Media Player and the Real Player.

Quicktime wasn’t quick enough.

Windows Media Player just wouldn’t play.

And Real Player couldn’t keep it real.

Quicktime does continue on but not at rockstar levels.

Apple continues to push the Quicktime format through the popularity of the iPhone which is purposefully blocked from playing Flash Video, as well as using Quicktime to present all video content on the Apple website as well as all apple outlets such as iTunes.

Apple Movie Trailers

This is one place that I still see Quicktime regulary. Often i go to the Apple Movie Trailer website to check out movies I’m anticipating as well as preview movies I’ve never heard of.

This is one place that Quicktime seems to work very well. However I would need to see a direct Flash comparison to know for sure.

Apple’s Movie Trailer website is slick, well organized and the video is very crisp. The video loads and streams quickly and I have the option of viewing the material in many sizes and formats from sub-vga quality up to 1080 HD quality. I also have the option for most of the trailers to download a version of the trailer for my iPhone or iPod. Pretty cool.

Will this excellent integration of Quicktime save the ailing rockstar? I wouldn’t bet on it. The market penetration of Flahs is too great. The only way out of this is to create a revolutionary new video player that is integrated like Flash and that offers something that no other player can match.

What this new platform will be or if it even happens is anyone’s guess.

In the meantime: Will Apple finally get a clue and enable Flash Video on my iPhone? PLEASE?!

-Kirk

Qik.com: Stream live video from your phone…(how this could be useful)…(or not.)

Since I’ve had my iPhone 3G I’ve looked through a lot of Apps at the ‘App Store.’

In my opinion, some of the best apps are only available to ‘jailbroken’ iPhones, iPhones that have been unlocked to allow unauthorized third party apps to be installed on the wonder-phone.

Taking advantage of an open platform for development (albeit unauthorized) is a small start up called Qik.

Qik’s App for the iPhone allows you to stream live video from your phone to Qik’s website. Qik code can be cut and pasted into social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace, allowing you to share your streaming video with your friends.

OK.

Now that you have basic understanding of what it is, here are my gripes. And I haven’t even used it yet.

Gripe #1: The streaming content examples on Qik’s website are utterly boring/senseless. Imagine someone streaming a very mundane 30 second snippet of their life to the whole world via an extremely compressed video stream. No editing, no second takes. All live all the time. Imagine a live web cam WITHOUT the stripper. Or whatever.

Gripe #2: See above.

Gripe #3: This will seriously clog up precious bandwidth over ATT’s data provider for those with Qik enabled smart-phones. I won’t be able to check my email as quickly or surf the net because some dunce is streaming video of his friend waving at the camera and talking unintelligibly in a bar. ATT and Apple never approved an App such as this for this reason. It makes sense to me.

Now here are two reasons I can see Qik being useful:

Idea #1: Live blogging just got a bit more interesting. Think about it. You are now a really crappy live news broadcaster, typing into your iPhone or laptop, while sending video snippets of what’s happening *LIVE*

Idea #2: Live broadcasting by reporters for established media companies with very little capital investment. Of course the giant media companies will never understand this or take any action that would put them in some kind of relevant position in todays media ecology. That would be crazy. Let the media Titanic continue to sink, thank you very much.

So there you have it.

In the end though, I see that this will probably provide only two things:

More mundane crap that maybe one person will ever watch.

And live porn adult shows of course. The adult industry will be quickest to monetize this feature.

-Kirk

Jumpcut.com: Stream your media….and your friend’s media

Jumpcut.com is quite an interesting concept: edit, remix and publish your short film without having to buy editing software…or a computer for that matter.

I had looked into Jumpcut last quarter as part of a brainstorm I had that people could now shoot, edit and publish short films at almost zero cost. By using a cell phone or cheap point and shoot digital camera, a person could record video, upload to Jumpcut, and then edit and publish using Jumpcut’s film editing cloud application.

Gone would be the day that a person needed a film crew, a big budget, and lots of assistants to create a successful film.

Looking again at Jumpcut, I am perplexed at how they can manage online film editing AND allow editors to grab other people’s clips, and use those within their own movie.

In this share and share alike film editing network, I wondered how a system could be setup to link this all together while providing a smooth viewing experience. It is quite alot to ask a server to stream a complete movie file….it’s entirely another thing to have a server stream the same movie, but have it made up of multiple video clips form different authors, rendered in real time with special effects and basic film grading.

So far my personal experience with Jumpcut has been a mixed bag. On one hand the interface is simple and quite powerful, on the other the streaming can be quite unreliable depending on the time of day that I try to use Jumpcut.

As bandwidth and server power/storage continue to improve, I imagine that even complex tasks like film editing will take place in the cloud.

-Kirk

Examining Streaming Media: Hulu.com

Well, I have seen some really BAD examples of streaming media and some that were fair. But I have to tip my hat to Hulu.com for providing a service so slickly packaged and entertaining, that it may soon replace TV (in my house at least.)

How Hulu.com streams such high quality media is beyond me.

I will take a guess that Hulu.com is using something similar to the system used by ABC used to broadcast it’s most popular shows like Lost, where video is delivered according to your bandwidth.

I may even speculate that Hulu.com uses some kind of broad P2P grid to distribute content efficiently.

By this I mean that they may spread the broadband load out over a peer-to-peer network, so that anyone who is watching ‘Firefly’ for example, is actually a server for others who wish to watch the same show, sending out small data packets in addition to the packets coming directly from Hulu.com.

Hulu.com gets it’s revenue form commercials which are situated within the content and which I assume are specifically targeted to the user. As new clients come and go, it is a relatively simple thing to slip advertising in or out of the content presented on Hulu.com

Genius!

And the clincher for Hulu.com is that it actually provides compelling popular content (Battlestar Galactica, Arrested Development) as well as ‘long-tail’ content that must have been relatively cheap to license (Alf, A-Team, Highlander.)

This is all speculation however and hopefully by the end of my Streaming Media course at the University of Washington I will understand the platform that Hulu.com runs on.

What I know for sure though is that Hulu.com has a bright future and offers a commercially viable alternative to both TV AND YouTube.

-Kirk

Hulu.com, will you free me from Comcast?

Welcome to the digital ecology!

Welcome to Digicology, a blog dedicated to informing internet content creators about the new digital ecology.

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