automation

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.

 

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.

 

I grew up in Philadelphia and Charles Barkley loomed large on the sports scene there. Sir Charles was incredible not because of his athleticism - he wasn't the fastest, tallest or strongest. No - what made him great was his ability to predict where the ball was going to be, and how a play was evolving, and to put himself in precisely the right spot on the court to make the play happen. Same is true of Gretzky, the best hockey player ever many would argue. The trick, he is famous for saying, is skating to where the puck is going. It's the same with great tech vendors.

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

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

By Andy Beach Well folks, the closing whistle just sounded and the lights went down on NAB 2008. All around me, exhibitors are starting to breakdown their booths (and I think my coworkers would like me to hurry up and lend a hand). I had an amazing time this year! The show did seem less crowded, but the people I met and spoke with were all the heavy hitters you could hope to have coming by. I got a chance to walk around more today and talked to a lot of folks.

By Andy Beach Well folks, the closing whistle just sounded and the lights went down on NAB 2008. All around me, exhibitors are starting to breakdown their booths (and I think my coworkers would like me to hurry up and lend a hand). I had an amazing time this year! The show did seem less crowded, but the people I met and spoke with were all the heavy hitters you could hope to have coming by. I got a chance to walk around more today and talked to a lot of folks.