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Jose Castillo, podcasting partner in crime from www.thinkjose.com on the Streaming Media Podcasts (www.streamingmedia.com/podcasts) interviews Jan Ozer of Doceo Publishing on the first day of Streaming Media West 2007.
This was our first joint interview since starting the podcast several weeks ago (I’m on the other side of the table manning the Popper Stopper) and Jan gave a great overview of his pre-day workshop as well as his software-based encoding session taking place on November 6.
This year’s Streaming Media West show was a positive in several ways. First, it continues to grow. Although it’s still a shadow of the same show back in the late 1990s (I remember moderating panels that had twice as many people as attended this year’s keynote) the show has attracted people from the various elements of streaming, including both suits & creatives.
The best keynote, for me at least, was the one I covered for my contributing editor duties at StreamingMedia.com, which had presentations from both Erick Hachenburg, CEO of MetaCafe.com, and also Betsy Scolnik of National Geographic (see the article at http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=9756). Good stuff, and a good reminder.
With the proliferation of Flash Video on the web, the recent announcement in Chicago at Adobe’s MAX 2007 conference that the newest versions of Flash Player and Adobe Media Player will include two new codecs was a welcome sign.
One of the codecs is a high definition profile of On2’s VP6 called VP6-S; the other is H.264, the videoconferencing standard codec that has also begun to take the broadcast world by storm.
Along with the announcement, which now brings the number of Flash Video codecs to four, there is an additional need for education on Flash Video and the options that each allow.
I’m honored to be asked to write a white paper on the topic; it’s been about six years since I stepped away from doing day-to-day market analysis, and I have to say I’ve missed it. This is a good topic to get my feet wet again.
This project also lets me do something I’ve not had a chance to do for several years: put a camera back in my hands to produce a set of video clips that will be used as reference material for the white paper.
More as the project progresses.
Our panelists have just finished “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” video panel at Texas Instruments TIDC (the TI Worldwide Developer Conference held at Hotel Anatole in Dallas), a variation of the live webcast we did at TI’s headquarters back in December 2006.
The variation on this one was that we had a live audience and that we expanded beyond transcoding to get to an overall picture of the state of consumer video delivery on the web, on DVD and via IPTV.
The audience questions were good, and also reminded me of the continual education we have to do to separate the types of delivery, the myriad codecs and the actual content from each other, in order to provide a consistent set of “terms of art” to describe particular problems or opportunities. More on this when I have a few more moments. Right now I need to track down my bag, which US Airways forced me to gate check last night in Philly – and which still hasn’t shown up 12 hours later.
As a follow up to the webcast in December for Texas Instruments, I just received an invitation to host a panel at TI’s Worldwide Developer Conference.
We'd like to broaden the scope slightly; the panel would be called "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of Digital Video". There's a lot of good in the market including the improved quality of the new, advanced video standards. There are some challenges in how transcoding will be actually implemented, however, at various points in chain. And if some of the challenges in digital video don't get solved, things could get ugly. Transcoding wouldn't be the focus of the panel, but would still be discussed in the conversation.
Sounds like a good panel.
