Download: A 13MB
download, but no questions asked and no prompting for personal info
Installation: At
about 80 seconds on my MacBook Pro (WinXP under Parallels), still not
zippy, but it asked just a few simple questions about configuration on a single screen. Much simpler than prior versions.
Loading: Loads up
quickly - much more quickly than older RealPlayers. Feels
fast. The UI still includes tabs for managing your media
library, looking at the RealGuide, etc. But interestingly,
the RealGuide, rather than be full of links to teenybopper pop
stars, is full of links to top content on YouTube, Metacafe, and the
like.
Downloading video from the Web:
Of course, the feature everyone's talking about, RP11 adds a "Download
This" link to videos that appear on any Web site with video.
Shown is a screenshot showing the button added to a
Brightcove page:
Clicking the
download button gets you a
download manager that resembles Firefox's download manager.
Videos
go into your video
library in their native format -- no conversions or
obfuscating file names -- it's just there in plain view in the home
directory (\My Documents\My Videos\RealPlayer Downloads by default)
One
interesting thing about RP11 is what it will not download:
RTMP
Streaming Flash video (from a Flash Media Server or equivalent) will
not download. Only HTTP-delivered FLV will work.
DRM-protected
video will not download.
The built-in "Share This"
button on RealPlayer sends a link to the original video content.
All
in all, I found that RP11 downloads video successfully from a
wide variety of sites, including YouTube, Metacafe,
Brightcove, CNN and others. My first "cannot record this" hit
came from Harvard@Home's Human
Systems Explorer site, which uses true Flash rtmp streaming
from Akamai.
Not a bad first impression.
Some things need further exploration. For example, I
haven't yet found out how to hide, when the player first opens, the
window that shows the RealGuide, the Library, and other stuff that's
not "just the video, please". Maybe this fits with Real's
apparent strategy to make the standalone player into a good media
download/management center and leave the embedded player for "video only" uses. I'll post more info as I learn
more.
Real
Networks' newest RealPlayer player appears to be a huge departure from
their earlier client-side products. While the Helix server
technology and the RealVideo codecs have been ones-to-beat in streaming
media technology, the RealPlayer has been the face of the
company
to the user community - and it hasn't always been a pretty face.
Real's marketing folks, in the heat of their battle for
survival
with Microsoft, saw RealPlayer as a the company's direct pipeline to
users' pocketbooks.
Let's face it - the
RealPlayer,
despite its technological excellence (SMIL 1.0 & 2.0,
universal format support, the
industry's best codecs, and support for
nearly every OS and browser out there) became an abomination - big
heavy download, cumbersome registration required, ads and eye candy all
over the place, "notifications" that pop up and annoy with marketing
messages.
Fast-forward to today -- In the new world
of the Web,
Flash is taking over because its player is everywhere and its user
experience is simple, unmarred by distractions, and an easy download in
the unlikely case you need it. I've even been able to install
the Flash player
using Firefox's
XPI Flash installer - no UI whatsoever, just one click and
it's in.
So
with many of Real's remaining customers (there are many, especially in
the higher-education industry) avidly looking for alternatives
to RealPlayer, and Real rapidly
approaching irrelevance in the video technology space, RealNetworks has
come up with a new approach. Real's new player (RealPlayer 11) boasts
two major innovations:
The player is small
and unobtrusive, with a quick, easy install that asks no
questions, takes over nothing, and generally leaves you alone.
In
what could be a stunning new capability, RP11 will download
non-DRM-protected video from any website, in any format (Flash. Real,
QuickTime, WindowsMedia, etc). While you're watching that
video on YouTube, Google,
Metacafe, Brightcove, or anywhere else, RP11 will add a little "save
this" button to the video itself.
The idea is that RealPlayer becomes the base of your personal video
library. You can share (by sending around links to the original
source), or with a $30 upgrade, burn to DVD disc. Presumably, one of
these options will let you easily flip content to your iPod.
There's a pretty good video
demo given by Real VP Jeff Chasen at Scobleizer.com.
Now aside from the obvious idea
that content owners may revolt at the idea of people being able to save
their content whether they want them to or not, I just don't see the
value to RealNetworks in a new player. Why offer it?
And I think the bigger question is, do we really need more players in
the industry? Isn't it already hard enough for consumers? How many more
players and plugins are we going to try and force viewers to have to
download?
The new RealPlayer gives the
users lots of control over Internet video -- watching it offline,
burning it to CD or DVDs, storing it in a library, etc. Sharing content
links directly from the RealPlayer library can be really useful. A
number of people who’ve tested the pre-beta have told me that they love
watching a few seconds of a video on a web site, then using RealPlayer
to download a copy for later viewing.
My take?
Looking at the education industry, up to now I see a large
investment in Real's technology that's been feeling more and more like
a liability, strictly because of the horrendous RealPlayers of
the RealONE/RP10 generation. Folks are looking at
costly switches to Flash video infrastructure not because the video or
server technology is so great, but mainly because the player has
mindshare and doesn't do anything to piss-off its users.
So,
if Real's new player is something that a) is a no-brainer to install
and use; and b) provides truly useful functionality on top of
the enormous-and-growing world of online video content, it may just
become relevant again to online users. And that's good for Real's
existing customers, for sure. How that helps Real acquire new
paying customers isn't clear to me, but I'd guess that anything that
makes RealPlayer more relevant in the marketplace has to be a good
first step.
While researching CDNs for storage and delivery of digital video, I
found that at least one major user-generated video
website provider is using Amazon's S3 service for delivery of
Flash video over HTTP. For http delivery of lots of clips on-demand, S3
is apparently doing the job. The costs are astonishingly low:
$0.15/GB stored per month
$0.18/GB delivered (or less)
A look at Dan Rayburn's recent blog post listing
streaming CDN
vendors shows some of the streaming heavyweights, with broad
networks
of origin and edge servers optimized for real-time media delivery.
Akamai, for example, pre-caches media content close to the
network's edges, making videos load quicker. For a site that's
advertising-funded, fast loading pages can lead to more page views,
which equals more revenue.
But, S3 is an option I hadn't thought of for online video.
There's no support for the RTMP or RTSP streaming protocols,
but many sites are just fine with HTTP download delivery these days. (Streaming
vs. Downloading - What's the Difference?) While it
may not be optimized around realtime delivery, it certainly
offers unlimited scalability at rock-bottom prices. And
options like its rich developer API and BitTorrent integration
could be an asset to a comprehensive media delivery strategy.
It's certainly an option worth looking at.
Dan Rayburn points out in his Business
of Online Video blog that streaming video isn't a Web 2.0
technology. But while Dan's point is that streaming video
has been around way too long to be considered part of the Web
2.0 "fad", I think the relationship between video and Web 2.0 is more
complicated than that.
The key ingredient of "Web 2.0" technologies that makes them worthy of
that label is that they have open APIs and are freeform
platforms that allow user behavior to define and create value.
Harvard
Business School professor Andrew McAfee says it well...
...the use of technology
platforms that are initially freeform (meaning that they don't specify
up front roles, identities, workflows, or interdependencies) and
eventually emergent (meaning that they come over time to contain
patterns and structure that can be exploited by their
members). Email is a channel, not a platform; groupware is
not freeform and typically not emergent; and knowledge management
systems were essentially the opposite of freeform -- they
presupposed the structure of the knowledge they were meant to
capture.
...so, to build a Web 2.0 service, Andy says,
Build platforms, not channels
Make sure they're initially freeform
Build in mechanisms for emergence. These
mechanisms include links, tags, powerful search...
...and, I'd add, simple APIs for combining and syndicating content from
one site to another. Sites like YouTube are on the edge of
Web 2.0 because of the ease with which users can publish their content
not just to YouTube, but to other sites. Web 2.0
facilitates video mashups: videos can be embedded across
sites, search results can be published as RSS, users can "mash-up"
collections of video with photos from Flickr and maps from Google or
Yahoo.
But, Dan's right - video isn't really Web 2.0 enough, yet. As
Microsoft's Jon
Udell points out,
The kinds of standard
affordances that we take for granted on the textual web —
select, copy, reorganize, link, paste — are missing in action
on the audio-visual web. The lack of such affordances in our current
crop of (mostly) proprietary media players suggests that open source
and open standards can help move things along. But nobody in the open
world or in the proprietary world has really figured out what those
affordances need to be in the first place.
Standard ways to search within video, associate a video timeline with
other media, and deep-link into video content simply don't exist.
RealPlayer and WindowsMedia always did offer a way to deep
link using start parameters in the .ram or .asx file URLs, but the
endless variety of custom Flash video players (since there isn't really
an official, usable "standard" one) means that even that simple method
is no longer available on most sites. And as for search --
while web search engines crawling into a Word document or a PDF file is
routine, video content search hasn't caught on, even though the
technology, from (the defunct) Virage,
Streamsage
(now part of Comcast) , Pictron,
Podzinger,
and others, has been around for years.
So, Online Video 2.0 is yet to be born - while video is a part of the
Web 2.0 ecosystem that generates value from unscripted user behavior on
freeform platforms, it's not yet ready to BE one of those freeform
platforms.
Article
on embedded event triggers in media files - Again, an old
one. Security changes in browsers have made some of these
examples not work right anymore without some tweaking. But
the basic embedding technique is still valid for simple things like
loading a new URL into another frame. .
Free Akamai best practices gujides: (BTW, I wrote
these. Akamai requests your contact info to download. they
only ask once and you get unlimited, perpetual access to all the
whitepapers.)
Flash video is great for users, but the player lacks easy, built-in
features Web developers have come to expect. But now, Jeroen Wijering
has developed the full-featured Flash
Video Player 3.6 which finally makes all the
features of a "real" video player available to Web
developers using Flash video on their sites.
The standard video players - RealPlayer, Quicktime and WindowsMedia -
all have APIs that help make it easy to embed interactive video onto a
Web page. The major video platforms provided simple run-time
customization capabilities that developers have come to expect from
video platforms. By setting values in either the web page or
the metafile (.ram, .asx, .qtl), you could accomplish a lot:
support for metafiles that can be generated on-the-fly
playlists
background colors and logos
captioning
control over the appearance of the player controls
fullscreen mode
autostart and repeat behavior
Naturally, if you are a Flash developer, you can make a player
that handles all of this. Indeed, unless you're simply
hard-coding an .flv URL into the stock Flash video player, you have to do
Flash development to make a more capable player. Jeroen's
Flash Video Player 3.6 solves all that. With an elegant API
that works through metafiles or FlashVars, you can customize the
playback experience without having to do a lick of Flash development.
What's more, a full Javascript
API includes controls (playlist navigation, play/pause, scrub
and seek, volume control, and movie loading), Javascript
callbacks, and metadata extraction.
This player covers all the important bases in terms of the
video player capabilities Web developers need, and makes publishing
Flash video as easy as publishing Real, QT or Windows Media.
It's distributed under a Creative
Commons License, free for non-commercial use, and nearly free
for commercial use.
The folks at Read/WriteWeb have put together a terrific Online
Video Industry Index that provides a snapshot of the current
online video marketplace. It's not about hardware or software
vendors, like Sorenson,
Accordent, or
Adobe, but rather
sums up the online services space very well. This
list breaks the industry down into categories that include Video
Sharing, Video Search, Video Editing & Creation, Video
eCommerce, Video Streaming, and others.
I've been working in this space a lot lately, and have worked with many
of the providers on this list, including some as-yet little-known ones.
While the authors disclaim the index as "not complete", to my
eye it looks pretty comprehensive. One useful addition would be Sorenson Media, which is getting into the space with its Squishnet video management service.
This is a great resource. In particular, many of the vendors in this index, as well as being consumer-oriented destinations for video, offer enterprise services and developer APIs that let companies and educational institutions build custom, branded video services on hosted infrastructure. Because of this, the consumer video Web is relevant far beyond the entertainment focus that's driving its growth.
Which Web video format is the best? Which encoding tool is the best
one? Which tools handle high-action video best?
If part of your job involves encoding digital video
for Web
delivery, you must read streamingmedia.com's research reports on codecs
and encoders. Some of the key points are summarized
in Jan Ozer's
article, Choosing
a Codec. Some highlights for me:
RealVideo is the best overall codec of all the tested
choices, and became the benchmark against the others were compared.
Differerent codecs were best at handling each combination
of encoding bitrate and content type (e.g. talking head vs. sports
video)
Some tools encode some formats and content types
exceptionally well, while doing a poor job on others.
VBR (variable bitrate) won't always offer an improvement
over CBR (constant bitrate), even for high-motion content.
Although I've been a contributing editor to streamingmedia.com and have
friends there, I have no financial interest in these reports. I just
think there's awfully helpful!
YouTube and its ilk have made embedding video into a web page simple
for people who are not developers and HTML gurus. For
institutional video installations like ours at Harvard, it can be just
as simple for our users to embed internally hosted video in their
course pages, Websites, and blogs. All you need is to have a
small Javascript file that generates the HTML that embeds the player.
This file lives somewhere on your Web server, and people
wanting to embed video in their pages simply reference it with a small
snippet of HTML they put into their Web page. Here's a simple
snippet of HTML that
users can use to generate an embedded video player:
The embedRealVideo.js script generates the EMBED statement that
displays the video in the page. Its source code can easily be
modified to support Windows Media or Quicktime plugins as well.
The user embedding video just has to paste the above code
snippet into their page, making sure to edit the clipUrl field
appropriately. For this RealPalyer example, that URL can be a
direct rtsp:// link, or an http:// link to ramgen or a .ram file.
Here's the source of the script, embedRealVideo.js: (you may have to remove the line wrapping in the document.write statements for this to work)
pClipUrl=""; var scripts = document.getElementsByTagName('script'); var index = scripts.length - 1; var myScript = scripts[index];
if (pClipUrl=="") { pClipUrl=myScript.getAttribute("clipUrl"); }
Jon's got a workable solution going with shell scripts, mplayer and
lame on his Mac OSX system. His screencast
of making it work is terrific.
I've done the same thing - it was my primary use of my iPod
even before podcasting was in broad use. For me, it was trying to
listen to a streaming National Public Radio
program in the bustle of the workplace that caused me to want to
time-shift the interview--record it, slip it over to my iPod, and let
it entertain my evening commute.
My process was just about as clunky, but it worked: my streamingmedia.com
article on Stream Recorders
reviews Streamdown - give it the URL to a SMIL, RAM, or ASX
file and it will promptly retrieve all the media files to your
desktop. Then I'd use RM To MP3
Converter from Boilsoft to
convert to something my iPod can deal with. And finally, as
the third step, use iTunes to sync the file to the iPod. For a while, I used RealPlayer to manage my files
and synchronization with the iPod. It saved steps, since the RM to MP3 conversion would be handled
automatically by RealPlayer. But it seems that iTunes and RealPlayer would end up fighting over
control of my iPod and I tired of dealing with it. I returned to using iTunes alone, for its predictability (and despite its dreadful performance).
But Jon's real question in all this was, "am I doing anything wrong" by
downloading and recording this audio. To me, the answer is
clear. Jon's not redistributing the program, he's timeshifting
it. Fair use. Settled law. Closed issue.
Managing Video Content - "Like Netflix, Only Better?"
The Videotools Video Content Management System, which my team
developed at Harvard Business School, is a first-place winner of the 9th
Annual Process
Innovation Award by Kinetic
Information.
Videotools was one of six winners in the
Innovative Solutions Category (Recognizing
Superior Solutions for
their Creativity and Effectiveness ).
Specifically, they look for
process improvement -- those applications that best exemplify
how technology can be used for business benefit.
A recent Campus
Technology article on Digital Libraries by Matt Villano
profiled Videotools, introducing it as "Like Netflix, Only Better."
It's flattering, even if that's a bit of a stretch!
But, Videotools does make an impact on the institution, by
providing three services:
Managing and automating the
encoding, metadata extraction and collection, and publishing of digital
video in various (and multiple) formats and bitrates.
Managing permissions, roles
and collections, and providing users with a video and media portal
where they can search, organize, and share video content.
Providing delivery
management that allows a unique URL for each video clip which applies
rulesets to seamlessly determine a user's permission to view a
video, detect their network location and preferred format/bitrate/size,
and generates a metafile (.ram, .asx, etc) that gets the right video to
the user quickly. (i.e. The same URL that opens a 1.5Mbps
RealVideo at full-screen when accessed from a classroom may provide
300kbps Real SureStream or 250kbps Flash video via http when accessed
from home.)
More information about how we designed and built Videotools, along with
our philosophy of how to think about these kinds of projects,
can be found in:
Democracies Online Newswire has just launched a public forum for folks involved
with multimedia technologies in the service of the public interest. From
their site:
Join our new online
exchange, Webcasting
and Multimedia in the Public Sector, dedicated to sharing experiences,
ideas, and "how-to" knowledge among those leading the way (or catching up)
with public sector webcasting. It is sponsored by the UK Local E- democracy
National Project which is funded by the UK Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.
As a Wiki site, it's still a little lean on content, although there are placeholder
pages for some great upcoming content (for example, the Enhanced Webcasting Specification
and the page with links comparing webcasting
format options). But it does have some cool links already, such
as:
In short, the Minnesota House
of Representatives provides contextual links and content within a special
window that includes the video. While it is built on top of the database
driven legislative document system, it illustrates how any local council
might connect a content management system with public meeting documents (agendas,
handouts, etc.) with both their live and archived video streaming.
How do you effectively test the way streaming media sites will appear
to people on modems, DSL, cable and other varied Internet
connections? My piece, A Bandwidth
Simulator for Testing Streaming Media addresses this, and elicited
this comment from a reader:
While netlimiter looks like an
interesting tool, I find it easy to
test the various stream rates of Real and Windows Media multibit rate
streams by changing the connection settings in Real or Windows Media
Player. For RealOne Player Tools>Preferences>Connection and for
Windows Media Player 9 Tools>Options>Performance. From what I've
experienced, adjusting the settings does a pretty good job of
simulating low-bandwidth connections.
This is a useful way to test the low-bandwidth content itself, but it
isn't really limiting bandwidth - it's just a simulation.
Instead, Netlimiter tests the
ability of the entire Web environment -- which includes the browser,
the media player, the media server, and any code you have running in
any of those places -- to adapt to actual (not simulated) changing
bandwidth at the "last mile". It's not as good a test as actually dialing up with
AOL from somewhere where touch-tone phones are still a novelty - but
it's a more accurate simulation than using media player preferences.
This week's entry on streamingmedia.com - a review of two products for
recording streams - VCRs for
Streaming. This may be a controversial topic, as evidenced by
RealNetworks'
lawsuit against StreamBox. That was settled out of court in
September 2000 when StreamBox backed off and killed its "Ripper" and
"VCR" products. Neither of the companies in the article responded
to requests to be interviewed for this article. Keeping a low
profile, I guess.
Still, if recording off the radio is legal, and my home VCR and PVR are
legal, then there's no reason for stream recorders to be anything
less. These two utilities are rough around the edges, but they
get the job done.
Streaming media is a great way to
receive multimedia over the Internet. But it doesn't help you much when
you're on a plane, in traffic, or sitting in your ice-fishing hut in
Minnesota. There's help available - StreamDown and SDP are utilities
that can record streaming media programs, letting you watch or listen
at your convenience.
For producing streaming media demos and training materials, as well as
traditional MS Powerpoint/OpenOffice Impress-style slideshows, there's
nothing as elegant and simple as screen recording technology.
Using special lossless codecs, you can get a perfect reproduction of
your computer screen (or a portion of it) in less than 40kbps, less
than 8kbps if it's as simple as just flipping among slides.
In two pieces on streamingmedia.com, I take a look first at Screen
Recording technology in general, along with a brief overview of
TechSmith's Camtasia and follow up with a review of
OPTx's Screenwatch.
In a nutshell, these are two tools that do more-or-less the same thing,
but for very different kinds of users. Camtasia is a great tool
for the individual creator doing one-offs, while Screenwatch is an
industrial-strength product for creating a scalable process in
educational institutions and enterprises.
They're still at it. Our friends at Acacia still claim to own the patent rights to all digital media delivery, including streaming. This story from NPR notes that spurious patents abound, and that this one continues a growing tradition of counter-constitutional patents being awarded and enforced. It also notes Acacia's strong-arm tactics in going after companies that won't (or can't) defend themselves against a claim, no matter how frivolous.
Patently Absurd - Acacia claims ownership of all digital media
Patently
Absurd - that's the title of Dan Rayburn's piece this week on
StreamingMedia.com.
California-based holding company Acacia
Research claims they hold
patents on streaming, downloading and just about every form of digital
audio and video distribution out there--including pushing MP3s from
peer-to-peer groups, streaming newscasts from Internet radio sites and
delivering movies through cable networks.
Acadia's approach has been to go first after adult content companies
and internet radio stations, but they are starting to send nasty-grams
to Fortune 1000 companies as well. You might think it's
ridiculous, and it is. Just like SCO's lawsuits against everyone
they can think of in their claims that Linux is a) theirs; b) bad; c) a
threat to national security; d) unconstitutional. They are ridiculous but they are still a
threat that needs to be faced and dealt with. Pretending they do
not exist will not make them go away.
Acacia is currently in litigation over
the matter with several adult
content Internet companies, many of which are fighting back and have
banded together to form the Internet
Media Protective Association (IMPA) and FightThePatent.com.
What should
the industry response to
Acacia's actions be and what options does a company have that has
received a letter? For starters, alert everyone in your company, and
anyone in the industry who does not know and should, about Acacia's
tactics. Education is the first step. If you have received a letter
from Acacia or know of a company that has, please have them go to www.streamingmedia.com/patent.
We have created an online resource where you can get detailed
information on Acacia, with links to the patents, prior court
documents, contact information for the patent lawyers, copies of
letters companies have received and other information you may need.
Encoding hundreds of hours streaming video from a conference or other
major event can be a monumental task that takes months to
accomplish. But attendees want to have the proceedings available
within days of the event, not months. That was the problem the
folks handling the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference had to
solve.
Jim Baker writes a great (and finely detailed) piece on DV.com about
the enterprise-scale
encoding farm they built for the WWDC. When you talk about
scalability, one-off oriented desktop encoding solutions break down and
new workflow processes and tools are needed. With the
scalable process Baker's team developed, they reduced the total
encoding time for the conference from last year's three months to a
blazing-fast two weeks.
What's interesting here is the way it suggests that Microsoft's
submission to SMPTE is not a big change in strategy, but may be what
was planned all along. First, develop technology that offers
something of value to the motion picture and broadcast industries; then
seed the marketplace with a bit of it here and there (the T2 DVD, Sigma
chip designs). Then, when the market value is demonstrated and
there's some product on the shelves, submit it as a standard to "grease
the wheels" of further adoption.
In the article, Tod DeBie notes that WM9 can get HDTV DVDs and other
media into the market sooner and better than standards-body driven
alternatives, which are still tied up in process. If WM9 does it
faster and better, and MS has opened the technology to SMPTE, then
industry adoption just might take off.
Finally, Tod says this:
There are many possibilities for
Microsoft here, and considering their obvious commitment to video
quality, the results are bound to be good for the consumer.
I'm not certain that Microsoft dominance over its markets is ever
particularly good for the consumer in the long run. For that
matter, neither is anyone's
total dominance over any
market. WM9 is great technology, but codec technology is a very fickle thing. Competing technologies leapfrog each other regularly, with the "best" codec only remaining "best" for a short while before having its title taken away by the competition. I only hope that the decisions and deals made in the next few months by the consumer electronics and broadcast industries are based on solid long-term business strategy. Whatever they choose, they (and we) will have to live with for a very long time.
The usual method of video production
is "destructive", which means that when you're done editing,
compositing, "effecting", and synchronizing your media elements, you
haven't preserved continuity with the original source
materials. You've made something new and separate from the
original source. What's more, the only descriptive path between the two
is, at best, the proprietary EDL format from your editing system of
choice.
This isn't a huge problem in itself - we're used to that just being the
way it is. But with all the media increasingly available on the
network, is there a way to do more editing, compositing, "effecting",
and synchronizing by reference rather than destuctively? What
efficiencies will this enable in the creation, delivery and consumer
usage of complex media content?
Most of the professional content
production environment has been replaced
with digital systems and networked with each other. Some of the
consumer
environment has also already been replaced with digital systems for
quite a
number of regional services. Such change grows expectations that both
content
production and delivery can be connected seamlessly from professional
systems
to consumer systems.
RealNetworks just announced the Helix Community
Grant Program. Real is giving away $75,000 this year in grant
money to support research and development in basic digital media
technology as well as functional extensions to streaming media delivery
systems. The projects
with the best chances will be the ones that fertilize the digital media
ecosystem, have open-source appeal, and have some conceivable future
commercial application.
The open-source Helix Community has already brought in a legion of
contributors, many from companies with commercial interests in the
Helix platform. This effort tries to bring more of the best
creative energy into the Helix ecosystem by funding the best academic-
and research-oriented ideas which might otherwise go undone or unknown.
In Helix's own words:
Enhancing our efforts to build the
first open multi-format platform
for digital media delivery, the Helix Community Grant Program will
support
the most promising innovations from developers and the global research
community.
The grant program will ensure the Helix
DNA platform incorporates cutting
edge research advances and has the widest extensibility. This program
welcomes
ground-breaking research proposals, inventive implementations and
creative
project ideas from independent developers, the academic and research
communities
or any non-profit or commercial enterprise engaged in digital media
research
and development.
As of this week, I've become a Contributing Editor at streamingmedia.com.
I'll be writing an almost-weekly column on technical topics related to
streaming media. Some of what I cover will be advanced techniques
and code, but I'll also spend some time talking about the basics.
After all, advanced stuff is cool, but the basics apply to each and every project.
The first piece appeared today - Streaming vs.
Downloading Video: Choosing The Right Solution. Future topics
will include how-to's, product reviews, and discussion of technical
happenings in the world of streaming media. If you have any
suggestions for topics you'd like to read about, please send 'em my
way.
The SMIL language just had its 5th birthday! On June 15, 1998
SMIL 1.0 became a W3C recommendation. I have fond memories of
that, since it was the SMIL tutorial article, Synchronized
Multimedia On The Web, that was my first published article.
If you haven't seen the example presentation, What I did Last Summer..., you
should take a look some of the neat tricks SMIL (even the old 1.0)
makes possible. But with respect to SMIL's birthday, Philip
Hoschka from the W3C pointed out a few notable notes:
Of these, I think the MPEG4/XMT connection is perhaps the most important for the continued growth and influence of SMIL in the communications industry.
Some cool SMIL 2.0 examples can be found at the French National
Research Institute INRIA's
site. INRIA also is the source of the LimSee2 SMIL
authoring tool. I've been meaning to give that a try...
These days, just about everyone that creates content is concerned about
copyright. Likewise, content creators and consumers alike
know that copyright is as much about allowing use of content as it is
about restricting it. After all, there's not much use in
publishing your stuff if no one's allowed to make use of it (RIAA/MPAA,
take notice)! The Creative
Commons, a project of Stanford Law School, Harvard's Berkman Center
for Internet & Society and others, aims to help. From the CC
website:
Creative Commons has developed a Web
application that helps people
dedicate their creative works to the public domain -- or retain their
copyright while licensing them as free for certain uses, on certain
conditions. ... Creative Commons licenses are not
designed for software, but rather for other kinds of creative works:
websites, scholarship, music, film, photography, literature,
courseware, etc. [more explanation of
licenses]
While initially developed for Web pages, Creative
Commons licenses can now be tagged to MP3 files. The CC
technique not only tags content with an approriate license, but it also
provides a way to drive traffic to the content creator's website.
The technique here can easily be applied to video and audio content
encoded using RealNetworks, Windows Media, or QuickTime tools.
There's never been a better way to both protect copyright and advertise
public access to digital video. And there's no excuse not to do it. Protect your content, empower your viewers, and contribute to the success of CC...all at once!
On the anything-but-personal publishing front....In a new report
entitled Online Video Advertising,
Jupiter Research finds that major streaming content sites are drawing
as many program viewers (and advertising viewers) in a day as a typical
cable TV program.
"Although many marketers think the
audience for online video is too
small, that audience has grown quickly in recent years. Top online
video sites regularly attract three to eight million viewers per week
and deliver five to 30 million video ads per week. Those audience
numbers are comparable with those of the top syndicated and cable TV
shows, which draw five to 10 million households per week."
Still, advertiser spending on streaming video ads is still a tiny
percentage of total online ad sales. This is bound to grow slowly
as advertiser assumptions about audience size and streaming video
quality become more favorable. How will Web users react?
Mozilla already has a "Block images from this server" feature that
kills ads dead on many pages. On the other hand, salon.com successfully "sells" a Free Day Pass to their site in
exchange for viewing an ad on your way in from the vestibule to the
quality content you want access to - one ad for the whole day.
Ads don't always turn people off - they only do when they are
obtrusive, annoying, insulting or utterly irrelevant. The growth
of online video advertising will depend on one of two things: either
the advertisers' ability to force you to view; or their ability to make
you happily willing to.
In my search for examples of the technology, the people and the content
that will make personal video publishing work in the real world, I came across this gem from Aisling
Kelliher at the MIT Media Lab Interactive
Cinema Group. The content on here is a mix of interesting
(even captivating), but not necessarily related, personal
projects. Following the link buried in this
post led to a very focused weblog chronicling MIT's Digital
Dialogues conference. You can spend some time exploring here!
Does the industry need a vendor-neutral synchronized multimedia format?
Over the last few years, I've become increasingly aware of the almost
endless different ways of authoring and delivering synchronized
multimedia presentations -- you know, the talking head with sync'd slides and a table of contents, transcript -- that type of thing. Along
with the varying different methods of implementing such a presentation,
(which include various combinations of SMIL1.0, SMIL2.0 Flash,
Quicktime, WindowsMedia with embedded events, WindowsMedia HTML+TIME,
RealVideo with RMEvents, Java, Javascript, Screenwatch and others),
there are countless desktop tools and web tools from dozens of vendors
that all facilitate authoring and delivery of these kinds of
presentations.
Of course, one problem with this scenario is that content authored
using one platform or toolset cannot be easily, if ever, ported to
others, or updated to keep up with ever-changing client-side technology
and competing de-facto "standards". Of course, if the shelf-life
of the content is short, this may not be a problem. But if you
need the material to be around for a while, or you need to publish to
multiple standards and formats on your own terms (not your vendor's), or
you want control and portability as a matter of principle and business
strategy, you're apparently out of luck in today's marketplace. I
think this is why, even with a bazillion vendor solutions out there,
there are so many homegrown solutions to this problem. Companies
want and need control over how their content is stored and delivered.
My question is this: is there a standard in the works anywhere that
creates, essentially, a vendor-neutral and implementation-neutral way to
represent the content of synchronized multimedia presentations. A
simple XML markup could represent the video and audio sources, slide
sources and timings, and basic table-of-contents information. It
could also include descriptions of basic polling or feedback elements,
as well as other kinds of presentation elements. Basically, it
would be an interchange format that various vendors' platforms would be
able to import and export. It would be simple enough to write by
hand if you wanted to.
I understand that SMIL 2.0 is capable of this and much more, but it's
more of an authoring language with an explicit implementation in mind.
It's much deeper than just a content description language,
although a subset of it might be appropriate for this purpose.
Other initiatives along these lines that I'm aware of include the W3C'sTimed Text
Format, various metadata efforts through ViDe, and more specific
standardization efforts by groups like DigitalWell.org,
and ISMA .
So...is there a demand for such a thing? Is there one in the
works? If we built it, would anybody come? Thoughts?
Broadband will drive the self-publishing of video and audio, expects Schmidt. That view explains their recent purchase of Pyra Labs (maker of Blogger), which was met with skepticism by many commentators. (Some others see it as a good fit. ) Traditional Big Media and Big Software will try very hard to kill standard, open formats for video and audio. According to Schmidt, unless they succeed, self-published "multimedia blogs" will one day rule.
Glaser's RealNetworks, with the hard evidence of over 1M subscribers paying a monthly fee to access CNN, ABCNewsLive, Major League Baseball, and other traditional content, sees more and more traditional media showing up on the Web. Metadata and searching is the power of the new paradigm. Is the ability to search rich metadata and random access to well-targeted content enough?
Or is TiVo on track to be the new RealONE Superpass (on-demand, random access to all the traditional media you want) while personal publishing rules in the Web world?
It certainly was interesting to participate and hear the differing opinions of Schmidt, Glaser, and the other industry luminaries that took part in the colloquium. Thanks go to HBS Profs Rob Austin and Steve Bradley for an excellent event.