HD

Greetings from San Francisco and NewTeeVee Live 2009. It has been a day filled with great announcements and honors. First - I was asked to speak at the show and represent Inlet as one of NewTeeVee's "Next Big Thing," a list of companies identified as market movers.

 

From Raleigh to Vancouver. Wow - what a trip. I'm not talking about a plane flight here, although North Carolina skiiers would probably embrace such a thing. Not thinking about a car trip either. I'm talking about Inlet Technologies powering the XXI Olympic Winter Games. Today we were able to announce something Inlet has been working on for the better part of the last year. And what an amazing adventure it has been.

 

 Quick weekend post friends to point out something cool.  Microsoft has shipped some new tools - IIS Media Services 3.0 so that anyone can now utilize the same technology used to deliver The Championships at Wimbledon and Sunday Night Football on NBC.  

As the title of this blog post suggests - our friends at Adobe have joined ABC with some buzz-worthy announcements.  In ABC's case, the subjuect is a catchy new show.  In Adobe's case, they made a flurry of announcements at Adobe MAX yesterday in Los Angeles. 

 

We often hear the word 'disruptive' used in and around technology discussions. The term sounds interesting and when used appropriately, it does tend to lend importance to a discussion. But what does it mean to categorize something 'disruptive'? Further, are disruptive events or technologies good, bad or indifferent to the overall landscape? The answer depends on where you sit within that landscape.

 

by Greg Wallace I recently learned about a new company - TenduTV - a broadband video channel featuring dance-related content, where a fellow Columbia Business School alumni Marc Kirschner is the General Manager. I was immediately interested in this venture because the idea intersects multiple currents in my life.

by Charlie Simonson Echostar is now the the first broadcaster in the US to support the transmission and display of VOD 1080p signals to/from their set top boxes (STB). This new functionality is part of DISH Network's latest expansion in high definition services, which includes the rollout of TurboHD, an all-HD suite of programming packages. Their new high definition services are supported by a proprietary system upgrade that, starting August 1, is being rolled out to all MPEG-4 HD DVR receivers.

By: Andy Beach Well, we are finally back in Raleigh and have almost recovered from the week that was NAB 2008. All in all, I think we had a great show. We talked to a lot of very interesting people. The show was definitely quieter than years past, but there was still a high caliber of folks milling around asking questions. All four of our products were garnering attention as well. Armada, the newest announcement was very well received. In case you missed the other posts or press releases, Armada is Inlet's encoding workflow management application. It not only distributes encoding across multiple CPU's (like traditional transcode manager's) it also adds a number of pro-encoding analysis and post encoding packaging and publishing steps to the process. The goal really was to take all the unmanaged tasks required of a modern compressionist and bring them under one automated workflow. It's a very exciting approach to the problem of large scale video encoding and I believe we'll see others start tackling the problem similarly very soon. But that wasn't our only announcement, the Spinnaker product family had a number of announcements. First and foremost, we demonstrated live H.264 video streaming to a Flash Media Server. We didn't stop there though - that H.264 video was streaming at HD resolutions! That's right, we've added a new format AND new resolution options to Spinnaker. We have HD quality video streaming in both VC-1 and H.264, meaning Spinnaker is an ideal solution for both Flash and Silverlight scenarios that involve both SD and HD video. But even that wasn't all for Spinnaker - we also announced and demonstrated an all new ASI ingest model. By accepting ASI input, we're going to allow cable and satellite operators to turn their feeds directly into streaming video for the web or mobile delivery without having to decode it out to baseband or SDI. This will make it much easier for guys who are dealing with hundreds of channels of video to take their content online and challenge new media channels that are cropping up. And of course, both Fathom and Semaphore were shown off as well and very well received. Fathom is our single station encoding, transcoding, and capture solution (like Armada, but on one CPU) and Semaphore is our quality control, analysis software. I'll be posting (and podcasting) more about all the products soon, and