MediaPlatform Webinar: Video and Your Network – The New Reality
Everyone knows that video is bad for your network. Except, that’s simply not true anymore. Join us for a lively discussion about how the “rules” of enterprise are being rewritten by technology innovations from Adobe® and others. In this presentation, Greg Pulier and Erik Herz, two recognized thought leaders in the enterprise video space, will explore the potential of multicast fusion on the Adobe® Flash® Platform to deliver breakthroughs in network performance when delivering a pervasive video experience.
Plus, be the first to hear about MediaPlatform’s truly radical advance in peer-to-peer webcasting from the cloud.
By Ilana Greene
I recently sat down with an event planner friend and posed her a set of questions that could only be asked in 2011, around the subject of how she plans an event that no one actually attends in person… a virtual event. Even there are no paper invitations, table cards, cocktails to serve or coats to check, a virtual event webcast is very much an event.
1) How do you think through the audience’s experience from start to finish for a virtual event?
- It’s got to be easy for the first time visitor – Any event website should be planned on the assumption that the viral visitor is a “first-time” visitor. Accordingly, the site should have a simple design for easy navigation and help the visitor fulfill the purpose of their visit.
- Capture the audience’s attention - A successful virtual event depends entirely on the effective capture of the user’s attention. The audience must be drawn to the subject matter instantly, and will only remain engaged in the event if the experience is being delivered as expected. User expectations are typically derived from event marketing and branding.
- Bear in mind that the presenter is not directly in front of the audience he or she is speaking to, which means things like tonality, subtle facial expressions and wit/sarcasm may lost, even if you are streaming in high definition video. I try and stay very direct or very obvious as not to accidentally convey something I do not mean. This might mean being delving into more than one example, or providing a host of reasons as to ensure my audience understands the message I am trying to convey.
- Know Your Customer – The first step in planning a virtual event webcast would be to conduct a needs analysis to determine the audience’s goals and objectives, and then build an event plan around those goals and objectives. Whether the stated goals involve increasing sales, marketing a new product or service, or making a press announcement, the usual desired outcome is to facilitate some action on the part of the audience members. Any event, virtual or otherwise, should account for the client’s desired action from his/her audience.
- Test the concept – When planning a virtual event it’s extremely important to put yourself in your audience’s shoes and make things as simple as possible. If you’re planning your first virtual event, it’s good to attend other virtual events to get a feel for what you like and what you dislike and what works smoothly and what you can improve upon.
2) What are the pitfalls of a virtual event? Where can things go wrong?
- Make It Simple - With the web landing page – or lobby – for a virtual event, you only have one chance to make a first impression. If the site is difficult to understand or the visitor can’t find what they are looking for, the visitor won’t return. Even if those errors are corrected in the future, reclaiming that lost visitor is nearly impossible. The best webcasting/virtual event solutions enable you, the event planner, to create a Web lobby that caters to their audiences’ wants, needs. A messy, or overly cluttered, Web lobby is the most common problem and can frustrate the user. Organization is key to maximizing the user’s experience.
- Murphy’s Law of technology plays a role – If it can go wrong, it will! Even with the best webcasting tools, glitches happen, systems crash, and programs freeze. It can be a nightmare, but there are ways to mitigate any serious event damaging problems. Test, test test… you absolutely have to test every link in the technology chain before you do your event – and use exactly the equipment you will use in the real show. It’s no good to test with camera A and Encoder B but go live with camera C and encoder D. You might as well be leaping without a safety net. Make sure you webcasting/virtual event service provider has a dedicated tech support person for your event.
- Virtual events also don’t allow for the personal one-on-one interaction which can be important in terms of building lasting, meaningful relationships.
3) Is it important to you to control the look and feel of every aspect of the experience, like the html invitation, the registration page, the reminder emails, the archive?
- Yes. Every step of the user’s experience should be thought through and streamlined. Your branding, website, email invitations, social media sites, and marketing tools related to your virtual event need to look extremely professional and polished. From a both a branding and marketing perspective, nothing is more important than a solid and consistent “look and feel” throughout all stages of virtual event planning. The more professional your marketing tools are the more likely people will be to register.
- E-vites, registration pages, follow-up emails, surveys and thank you should all seamlessly blend. Colors, layouts, and typefaces must be the same. Based off of his/her initial viewing, the user should be able to instantly know, without “digging” through the content, exactly where and what a given supplemental branding/marketing piece is in reference to.
- Aesthetics also convey a message, so try and stay mindful of this aspect of the experience as well. It is basically a challenge to try and navigate the fact that people will have different takeaways from your presentation, but it is your job to try to be as thorough as possible to accommodate as many people as possible.
4) How about the presentation itself? What’s important in terms of managing the presenter and making sure that he or she has a good experience?
- Chronological order Make sure that all your objectives are in chronological order to build to your concluding point. Always provide examples on how the information can be applied and used in a real setting/situation, as well as the benefits of your points. Provide a recap with notes. And make sure all deliverables are provided in a timely manner.
- Know the material A good corporate communications team will ensure that the presenters are well-briefed on the issues and, in the case of an executive town hall session and the potential for employee discontent, aware of any hot-button topics that could derail the presentation. I’ve seen nothing worse than an ill-prepared presenter who fumbles through his PowerPoint slides, gets defensive or gets off-message. It is important to find a presenter who has had experience with virtual events. Having the ability to screen questions before the presenter responds to them (or even send them to legal for a quick look during a live presentation) can be extremely useful.
- Succinct and on point Giving a virtual presentation is different from doing an in-person presentation in the sense that the presenter needs to be succinct and on point because he does not have the luxury of subtle non-verbal communication. Even with high quality, high definition streaming of video, the audience generally isn’t paying as close attention to the presenter as they might in a live setting.
- Mimic the “look and feel” The presentation should also mimic the “look and feel” characteristics exhibited throughout all branding and marketing phases and sub-phases. Typically, virtual events are much shorter in length of time than those “physically housed” (standard in-house events). Virtual events are instant and energetic. Consequently, a virtual event must be hosted by someone who shares similar qualities.
- Mental stimulation . A good audience needs mental stimulation. The user needs to be entertained. Asking questions, talking about breaking news (relevant to the subject matter, of course), and listening to the user’s feedback are all host/presenter must-do’s.
5) How about the audience? Do you want to be able to make sure that everyone is happy? How important is it to have real time awareness of what’s going on, say through live chat features during a webcast?
- Real time awareness is essential - it is really the only way to know if the audience is actually interested and engaged in the subject matter. Engaging with the audience through the use of a live chat, for example, provides an excellent way to ensure that the user experience is being met – or not met – as expected.
- Include Q&A – The audience needs to be able to ask questions or make comments through the virtual event. Have a dedicated person monitoring this chatter and responding to comments and questions. Also be sure this person has a way to convey what is happening to the presenter. Have a forum for the audience to send questions live so there’s real time Q& A. Real time awareness and participation is very important so the audience is engaged and not feel like he/she is being lectured. Monitoring chat is also an effective way to build community around the event, but it’s not wise to let people just comment without an intermediary filtering out odd or counterproductive material.
- Understand what is being presented - The audience is most content when they understand what is being presented, and understand how they can use the information that is being presented. Otherwise, if the benefit of the information is not obvious, people begin to feel like you are wasting their time, or that you do not understand their needs.
Why is enterprise technology so far behind consumer technology? Because the “user” isn’t the same person as the “buyer”. In enterprise software the user is generally a non-IT person, but the buyer is usually the IT department. Enterprise SaaS gives users greater influence over technology adoption, leading to products that are built to be used, not sold.
The combination of cloud, social computing and mobility can be used to raise productivity. Users expect to get access to personal, work, business applications and data from any device, anytime and anywhere.
The cloud might sound like a buzzword but is in fact a superior architecture, not because it makes installation and updates easier, but because it starts to remove IT from the purchasing process, meaning the user and the buyer are, increasingly, the same person. This will lead to high-growth markets, that will be dominated by enterprise software companies that didn’t exist a decade ago.
Business unit stakeholders often recognize the value of new technology before IT departments can harness it. In addition, emerging markets are growing rapidly in terms of technology expenditures and influence. Growing technology use and energy consumption around the globe have led to an increased emphasis on green technologies and power conservation within IT industries.
2012 is going to be a renaissance year for enterprise software, and everything—including, most importantly, the way we work—will be transformed along with it.
How Youtube Will Look in 2012
In 2011, we saw Google’s video-sharing service undergo more tweaks, spit out more new features and reach more major milestones than in previous years.
Sanwa Supply Rolls Out Micro Projector For iPhone 4/4S
Japan-based accessory maker Sanwa Supply started selling the 400-PRJ011 [JP] in its online store, a DLP micro projector that slides onto an iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S. Read more here.
Mobile Augmented Reality by Blippar™
Blippar, the UK startup behind an eponymous mobile image recognition and augmented reality platform, has landed seed funding from Qualcomm Ventures.
MediaPlatform Director of Business Development Erik Herz was interviewed at the recent Streaming Media West conference in Los Angeles. Herz explains why companies no longer have to stream Windows Media inside the firewall and Flash outside. Read the article here.
YOUTUBE FOR SCHOOLS
YouTube is launching a brand new tool for students and teachers. “YouTube for Schools” is a portal that helps curate education materials and videos on subjects such as history and math while filtering out potentially offensive or distracting content.
IS THE KINDLE AMAZON’S TROJAN HORSE?
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/12/amazons-trojan-horse-dont-underestimate-the-kindle-fire/
REALTIME SEARCH ENGINE FOR MOBILE DEVICES
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/13/topsy-launches-realtime-search-engine-for-mobile-devices/
OCCUPY MOVEMENT AS NEW MEDIA INCUBATOR AND LIVE STREAMING SHOWCASE
The Occupy movement is not only benefiting from digital tools, but also adding to and transforming the landscape of new media available to today’s advocates. Instead of asking how digital technologies are transforming advocacy, is it more appropriate to ask how contemporary advocacy is transforming digital technologies?
http://mashable.com/2011/12/12/ows-tech-innovation/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/business/media/occupy-movement-shows-potential-of-live-online-video.html
MOTOROLA XYBOARDS
MOBILE TIME SPENT > PRINT BUT NOT IN $$ SPENT
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/12/time-spent-mobile-print/
UPHEAVAL IN MICROSOFT MOBILE GROUP
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/an-executive-shuffle-in-microsofts-mobile-group/
By Mr. Bitz
It has come to Mr. Bitz’s attention that not everyone out there has the kind of lucidity on the important subjects of video streaming that our world simply demands. This is a serious matter. Video streaming is one of those stealth topics that underlies many aspects of modern technology life. Mr. Bitz is here to explain all of life’s big mysteries to you. Understand that video streaming is central to the design of mobile devices, the capacity of corporate data networks, and even the future of what we now call television. So, what is it?
Most of us know what video streaming is, even if we can’t explain it very well. You click on a video player in your Web browser and after a few seconds of something called “buffering,” the video starts to play. Sometimes, if the network connection is slow, the video will stop as the stream catches up to where you are. Let’s look at what’s actually happening.
Video files can be huge. Even with compression, a few minutes of video can be many megabytes of data. To avoid having people wait for ten minute to download a two minute video file, some very clever folks developed a concept called streaming. Streaming involves chopping up that massive video file into pieces and sending them to your device one at a time. The media player on your device then decodes the data, piece by piece, and plays the media for you. Before the player starts showing you the video, it stores up a few chunks as a “buffer,” allowing you to see the material without interruption. The device is receiving pieces of the stream in advance of your viewing them. If the network gets slow, you will outrun the stream and have to wait for it to catch up. This is what happens when your online video freezes.
Mr. Bitz has found that most people grasp the streaming concept pretty easily. However, where things get complex, and Mr. Bitz finds his tell-it-like-a-four-year-old skills in high demand, is in the slightly deeper technical aspects of streaming. It’s easy for smart people to get confused when trying to figure out what is meant by codecs, formats, and transports. For example, if Mr. Bitz said that he was going to stream an FLV video in the H264/AAC codec using RMTP, you might find that a bit opaque. Let’s break it down and understand what that means.
One reason that streaming is confusing is that it is time-based and involves multiple processes. In contrast to a simple data management task, such as creating and saving a Word document, where you have a single file in one data format (.doc or .docx), with streaming you have a core video data format, a “container” using for moving the data as well as the time-based dimension of moving the data itself in a continuous stream.
Video streaming contains three layers of data management:
1) The encoded bits (e.g. H264 for video and AAC for audio)
2) The “container” that holds the encoded bits together (e.g. FLV or MP4)
3) The “transport” that is used to move the stream from the media server to the player (e.g. RMTP)
Based on a discussion with the eminently brilliant video expert, Erik Herz of MediaPlatform, Mr. Bitz has come up with a useful allegory that presents a real world analogy to streaming. (Yes, hard as it is to believe, even Mr. Bitz occasionally has to have things explained to him. Don’t want to blow your mind or anything, but it can happen…) Here goes: Imagine that you like assembling jigsaw puzzles. The bigger the better. You want to assemble a jigsaw with 50 billion pieces! This puzzle is so huge that it has to be shipped to you in a freight train. Every boxcar contains a billion puzzle pieces. The train pulls up. You start unloading the boxcars in order to assemble the puzzle. In this allegory, the boxcars are pieces of the FLV file. FLV is a data container for encoded video data. The puzzle pieces are the H264 encoded representation of the video. The train tracks are the network “transport,” such as RMTP. The big pile of pieces that you’re adding to the puzzle is the “buffer.” A special file called an M3U8 tells the player the order in which to play the stream. It’s analogous to the ship’s manifest, instructing the train workers on which car to unload first.
As with so many other processes that occur in computing, all of this happens so quickly that you hardly realize it’s going on. Mr. Bitz hopes that this explanation of streaming will help you understand better what’s going on when you watch a video on your PC or mobile device – or when you’re trying to get your head around what’s going on in your datacenter when you’re trying to stream videos. There’s a lot of room for confusion, given the multiple layers of technology inherent in streaming, a situation that’s compounded by competing transport and format standards. It’s often difficult to tell where you’re having a problem. However, as long as Mr. Bitz is here, you have an ally in understanding the root cause of your video issues.
Ilana Greene, the financial blogger who periodically guest blogs for us, just shared a video she created on the topic of social media use at work. You can check it out at YouTube. http://youtu.be/4GreeTw3JA4. Her post raises an interesting question, at least for me, which is how new is social media, really? Yes, of course it’s new, in that people weren’t using Twitter or LinkedIn a decade ago. But truly, there isn’t anything so novel about a social activity which can distract people in the workplace. I can remember when office workers used to have drinks at lunch, return to the office for a few hours of low productivity and then slink home at 4:59 PM. Top that, Facebook!
All of this reminds me of what my grandfather once told me about multicast fusion on the Adobe® Flash® Platform. Well, not really. He was born in 1884, died in 1942 and never knew that something called a computer had even been invented. (And though I am somewhat ancient, I never met him.) But, he understood business very well, and how people functioned. I think he would have had the following insights into Adobe’s revolutionary new online video technology:
- If a video is meant for everyone in a business, everyone should be able to see it. My grandfather ran a chain of clothing stores in the Deep South. He was successful because he understood the need to communicate with all of your employees. Until the advent of multicast fusion, it was almost impossible to enable to reach everyone in an enterprise with a video message. Now, you can.
- Cost matters. This may sound obvious, but it’s curious to see a lot of smart people in big companies invest lavishly in video infrastructure that never quite seems to get the job done.
- Keep it simple. My grandfather had a simple, secret code that he wrote on every price tag so he knew exactly what he paid wholesale for each item. That way, he knew how much he could discount it. It was a simple, clever way for a man (who never went to school) to run a business. Enterprise video should be the same. A single system, a single format, should feed all video needs. Flash can do this, especially now that MediaPlatform WebCaster can multicast Flash inside and outside firewall as well as to mobile devices using HLS.
- Don’t wait. Just do it. My grandfather’s first store wasn’t even a store. Unable to afford rent on a store, he simply opened a trunk of ladies dresses on a sidewalk and started selling them to women walking by. Multicast fusion is now. The very simplicity of the technology makes it possible to go ahead and get started without delay.
- Sometimes, you have to sell the underwear. Once, upon hearing that there might the possibility of a big crowd in another town, my grandfather loaded a 1931 Chevrolet to the ceiling with underwear and drove all night to put it on sale the next day. (The car’s axle broke, it was so laden with merchandise.) But, we can learn an important lesson in enterprise video from this story. Doing video right may require us to go the extra mile. Excellence doesn’t come easily. The good news is that multicast fusion removes some of the barriers to success. However, a lot of the time, you need to make that extra, 1931 Chevy kind of effort.
The archive of our webcast “Enterprise Mobile Video: What’s Next?” is now available for on-demand viewing.
Some topics discussed by Jonathan Taplin, Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC, and Greg Pulier, President and Founder of MediaPlatform, include:
- How mobile video for business is consumed differently from consumer mobile video
- The importance of the form factor in the business viewing experience
- The next major innovations in mobile video
- The impact of mobile video on training, internal communications and marketing
We are very pleased to announce that the WebCaster product video, which can be seen on our homepage www.mediaplatform.com, has received a 2011 MarCom Platinum Award for Web Video from the Association of Marketing & Communications Professionals.
It is very gratifying to see your work as a marketer honored by fellow marketing professionals. This video, which I encourage you to watch, shows how our WebCaster software enables a sales presentation to flow from studio to end user, and then to our PrimeTime video portal. The video features a continuous narration that takes the presenter from in front of the camera into the software interface itself, switching back and forth between the audience’s view of the presentation, the video studio, and the software backend.
Producing this video was a group effort. Vaughn Hannon, who has since left MediaPlatform for a creative role at a major theme park ride development concern, brought his substantial talents as a director and storyteller to the script that I wrote. (Who said those years I spent tracking down true crime victims for the ABC Sunday Night Movie were wasted!) We had an excellent crew at Mitchell Cohen’s production studio, including Rachel Bailit, Adam Lightwave, and Lauren Moore. Andrea Kang helped put the whole thing together. Of course, Melissa Detwiler was fabulous as our star presenter on camera.
Stay tuned for more video production from MediaPlatform in 2012.
As Mr. Bitz, the one who explains life to all of you, my middle name ought to be “big deal.” As in, what’s the big deal with HTML 5 video? Well, I can tell you that it is, in fact, a big deal, though like so many other technical marvels, some of the finer details have not yet been figured out.
First, were you even aware that HTML 5 was in the process of being rolled out worldwide? Maybe I ought to go back a little further and ask if you knew that almost every Web page you’ve seen in the last few years was written based on the HTML 4 standard? A quick digression is in order. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the underlying source code for Web sites. If you select “view source” on your browser, it will reveal the code that makes the Web page exist. HTML is full of markup “tags” that tell the browser how to render the content on the page. For example, if I added the <b> before a word and </b> after it, the word would appear in bold. Thus <b>example</b> in html becomes example on the Web page. When the Web was first created using HTML 1 in the early 1990s, it quickly became apparent that the language was not adequate for the myriad commercial uses that exploded with the popularity of the Web. HTML 2 was released in 1994, based on the work of standards bodies that govern the technology used on the Web. HTML 3 followed in 1995, with HTML 4 coming along in 1996. And then, things got kind of sloooooooooooooow. Now, after just 15 short years, we are gearing up for HTML 5. But, it’s been worth the wait. To be fair to everyone involved, the Web has become massively complex and just plain massive… a trillion URLs, a billion users, billions of devices, multiple browsers. Even Mr. Bitz might need 15 years to sort out a better approach than HTML 4.
HTML contains all kinds of embedded links, such as hyperlinks, or in our particular zone of interest, connections to media players and media “objects” that tell the browser how to play different types of media. For example, in HTML 4, if you want a Web site visitor to be able to view a video in the Adobe® Flash® format, you need to embed an instruction to open a Flash player in the HTML code. It’s not a big deal, really. Virtually all PCs have Flash installed. The HTML code required to place a swf format (Flash) video called mrbitzvideo on a Web page would look like this:
<object classid=”clsid:XYZ” width=”550″ height=”400″ id=”mrbitzvideo” align=”middle”>
<param name=”movie” value=”movie_name.swf”/>
<!–[if !IE]>–>
<object type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” data=” mrbitzvideo.swf” width=”550″ height=”400″>
<param name=”movie” value=”movie_name.swf”/>
<!–<![endif]–>
<a href=”http://www.adobe.com/go/getflash”>
<img src=”http://www.adobe.com/images/shared/download_buttons/get_flash_player.gif” alt=”Get Adobe Flash player”/>
</a>
<!–[if !IE]>–>
</object>
<!–<![endif]–>
</object>
Yes, yes, I know just looking at this might give you a headache, but Mr. Bitz doesn’t pull punches. Sometimes, you have to get technical to understand what’s going on in tech. Sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how many folks just want to learn about tech without any tech content. A couple of things to note in this code example: The whole thing is based on the <object> HTML tag, which tells the browers to activate an object (a piece of software code) called “x-shockwave-flash” player. That player is installed on the PC. If it’s not, this code also contains a link to the Adobe site where you can download Flash. You’ve probably had the experience of wanting to watch something but being told by the browser that you don’t have the right version of whatever player is required. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the problem that HTML 5 is trying to solve.
HTML 5 is intended to free you (and Web developers who create sites) from the challenge of requiring a media player installed before one can watch a Web video. It also frees you from the hassles inherent in constantly upgrading your players. For developers and media producers, it theoretically frees them having to publish multiple versions of media content.
How does HTML 5 do that? The breakthrough is the introduction of a universal “video” tag, coded as <video>videocontent</video> that tells the browser that a piece of video content is embedded on the page and might need to be played. In practice, the video tag in HTML 5 looks like this:
<video id=”example_video_1″ class=”video-js” width=”720″ height=”480″ controls=”controls” preload=”auto” poster=”images/video-file-snapshot.png”>
<source src=”video/vidoe-file.m4v” type=’video/mp4; codecs=”avc1.42E01E, mp4a.40.2″‘ /> <!–for Safari/iOS–>
<source src=”video/video-file.webm” type=’video/webm; codecs=”vp8, vorbis”‘ /> <!–for Chrome and Firefox –>
<source src=”video/video-file.ogv” type=’video/ogg; codecs=”theora, vorbis”‘ /> <!–for older Firefox and others–>
<!– Flash Fallback. Use any flash video player here. Make sure to keep the vjs-flash-fallback class. –>
<object id=”flash_fallback_1″ class=”vjs-flash-fallback” width=”720″ height=”480″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” data=”http://releases.flowplayer.org/swf/flowplayer-3.2.1.swf“>
<param name=”movie” value=”http://releases.flowplayer.org/swf/flowplayer-3.2.1.swf” />
<param name=”allowfullscreen” value=”true” />
<param name=”flashvars” value=’config={“playlist”:["images/video-file-snapshot.png", {"url": "video/video-file.flv","autoPlay":false,"autoBuffering":true}]}’ />
Whoa! Now, you’re probably thinking, is this simpler than HTML 4? I don’t think so. It is and it isn’t. Yes, the code does simply instruct the browser to play “example_video_1” using the <video> tag. However, because the standard is “immature,” meaning that it hasn’t been fully agreed upon by everyone, the video tag must allow for multiple media types. In this case, the site developer must provide the same video in the .ogv format, m4v, and webm. Then, just in case that wasn’t complicated enough, he or she still provides a Flash backup in <object> form.
Again, why is this a big deal? Well, if you’ve been following the tech industry news lately, you know that some major tech players are favoring HTML 5 over some of the dominant approaches. For instance, Apple is not supporting Flash on the iphone or ipad, though there are of course solutions to this problem. In theory, and this will surely be a reality soon, HTML 5 will save everyone a lot of time and hassles in developing and consuming Websites that contain video. In the meantime, however, getting HTML 5 video right will take some skill and attention to detail.
LOS ANGELES – November 2, 2011 –MediaPlatform, Inc., the enterprise video software company, has been named to Streaming Media Magazine’s inaugural list of “The 100 Companies that Matter Most in Online Video.” In a selection process that started this fall with more than 200 companies across the online video ecosystem, the magazine’s staff and contributing editors chose MediaPlatform as one of the companies doing the “most important and innovative work in online video today.” “The companies in the Streaming Media 100 represent many different pieces of the online video ecosystem,” said Streaming Media editor Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen, “but they all have one thing in common: The world of online video today would be markedly different without any of them. Each one, in its own way, has made the online video industry what it is today and is pushing it towards the future.” Streaming Media said the magazine’s goal was to create a list of companies that are the most important, most innovative, and have had the most impact on the space in the recent past and are likely to continue to do so in the future. MediaPlatform’s flagship product, WebCaster— available in cloud-based and on-premises versions — enables enterprises and digital media producers to produce, broadly distribute and monitor interactive live and on-demand webcasts that feature streaming video, PowerPoint® slides, audio, surveys, polls and screen demoing. Over the past year, MediaPlatform has introduced:
- The first enterprise webcasting software enabled with multicasting video to the Adobe Flash Platform using the Adobe Flash Media Server, a process that results in radical improvements in network efficiency— and lower costs — compared to traditional streaming techniques.
- The ability to deliver live webcasts on the Apple iPad® using HTTP live streaming (HLS).
- Pay-per-view capabilities on its WebCaster software
- Support for UTF-8 to enable text in any language and Adobe Stage Video to enable audience members to improve their playback quality while reducing processor usage by up to 85 percent.
- Partnerships with other industry leaders such as Onstream and Adobe to help these companies bring next-generation webcasting to a greater audience
“Every new feature we add to our webcasting and media management software is designed to make a significant difference for enterprises that want to benefit from online video,” said Jim McGovern, CEO, MediaPlatform. “We’re grateful that Streaming Media, the most has influential magazine in the space, has recognized our work as important and innovative and we look forward to continuing to bring innovations to the industry for years to come.” NOTE: MediaPlatform will be exhibiting its technology in booth 87 at the Streaming Media West 2011 conference in Los Angeles on November 8-9.
About MediaPlatform, Inc. MediaPlatform, Inc. delivers best-in-class webcasting and media management technology to global enterprises and digital media producers. MediaPlatform’s webcasting software enables high-impact presentations for lead generation, corporate communications and training. The company offers organizations the ability to take advantage of scalable cloud-based computing, as well as on-premises deployment, to present and manage rich media. With media management tools built on its platform, the company helps clients derive long-term archive value from their investment in media conten
It’s pretty easy for men to dress appropriately for a webcast. You can’t go wrong with a tailored suit and tie when trying to present a polished and professional image. There are however, outfits that will make a male presenter look dull, sloppy, or indifferent. Here are four things that male presenters should NOT wear when shooting a webcast:
1. Bulky turtleneck sweater – A shapeless sweater can add weight and an air of untidiness to a presenter. A turtleneck, as aptly described by webinar expert Ken Molay, can also make the presenter appear like a turtle poking his head out of a shell.
2. Short sleeved shirt – Even if you try to spruce this type of shirt up with a tie, it still looks awkward and untidy on camera. See below.
3. Undershirts – Avoid wearing these under a button down shirt. It can look too casual, messy, or unprofessional.
4. Pinstriped shirts – The narrow lines on this shirt will create a shimmering effect on camera. It’s like an optical illusion and you don’t want your viewers thinking that their eyes are playing tricks on them. If you do choose to wear pinstripes, make sure they’re bold and wide.
And gentlemen, it isn’t girly to put on makeup and groom yourselves before presenting on camera. Light powder or foundation can take away the shine on your face so that you don’t look oily or sweaty and also serves to cover up any small blemishes. It’s also important to be clean shaven and to trim any visible hairs, as the camera will pick up on EVERYTHING! So put on a crisp, tailored suit, avoid the clothing options above, and you’ll be well on your way to looking like a polished star in your webcast!
Remember when people used to say, “Smile, you’re on ‘Candid Camera’”? as a way of goofing on something silly you were doing that might get caught on film. Well, guess what, four out of five of us are all on “candid camera” pretty much anytime we sit down at our PCs. A whopping 79% of laptops now have webcams. I learned this from Matt Szymczyk at We are Organized Chaos blog, who commented on this phenomenon recently. According to Szymczyk:
- 79% of laptops now have webcams. (source: PC world)
- 72% of 18-20 year olds own a laptop. (source: Pew Internet & American Life Project)
- 83% of college students own a laptop. (source: Student Monitor)
- More than 50% of Gen Y owns a webcam. (source: Cisco)
- As of March 2011, more than 40% of Skype minutes involve video to video calls (source: Skype)
It’s not as if those cams are always on. (Heaven forbid!) But, what’s happening is an inevitable change in the way we relate to our PCs. Just as it became a standard expectation that a cell phone would have a camera on it. Just for those of you younger than 20, a phone without a camera was pretty much the standard for most of the last 100 years. A classic piece in The Onion explains it all for you.
Szymczyk is interested in the data about webcams from the perspective of augmented reality, a fascinating technology from http://www.zugara.com/. From our perspective, the webcam data portends two somewhat more prosaic trends, but not less significant.
- Webcasting will use more distributed presenters on webcams – When almost everyone has a webcam, then pretty much everyone can be a video presenter on a webcast. We cater to this need in our WebCaster software, which enables switching between remote presenters who can be on webcam if they choose.
- User-generated content, already on the increase, will continue to blossom. Our PrimeTime media management software enables users to record video material right into the searchable online video portal from their webcams.
That said, there are still two elephants in the room, two little things called “lighting” and “sound.” We live in a world of compromises, and unfortunately the compromise we make in exchange for having a complete video capture device welded right into our laptop cover is some potentially horrible quality lighting and sound. This may not matter if you’re skyping with your mom. However, if you’re presenting to 10,000 people on a live corporate vent, as many of our clients do, you will want better lighting and sound than you normally get with a webcam.
Sound: there are many great USB microphones you can get for your PC – check out http://www.soundprofessionals.com/cgi-bin/gold/category.cgi?category=140&template=homepage as but one example. It’s really worth the money.
Lighting: To be fair, it’s not the webcam’s fault that the lighting in your office makes you look like Frankenstein. There are also some good options available to solve the problem. One is VidEssence, as blogged about by our friend Ken Molay. This is a cold fluorescent lighting set that wraps around your laptop monitor.
Colin Evans, senior IT systems specialist for Motorola Mobility, participated in a panel discussion with IT pros from Boeing and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, moderated by Patty Perkins of Wells Fargo, during Streaming Media East, and spoke about using MediaPlatform for enterprise streaming.
In the video below, Colin discusses switching to MediaPlatform, which he calls a “fantastic enterprise streaming solution”, when Motorola reached the point where they were no longer able to support all of the feature requests they were receiving and needed stronger cross-platform and cross-browser support.
Colin goes on to detail how, with the exception of their streaming server, Motorola keeps everything outside the firewall with MediaPlatform and “highly recommends” the cloud for companies without an existing platform for its rich media content.
The Motorola presentation begins at 18:18 and can be downloaded here.
You need to know that Mr. Bitz is here for you. I feel your pain. One day you’re living your life sans problems. The next thing you know you’ve got this nagging sensation that you’re a total ignoramus and hopelessly out of date. Don’t worry; Mr. Bitz has been there, too. I felt it when I saw a 9-year old texting on an iPhone while riding a skateboard. I still don’t own an iPhone, and I didn’t even own a cell phone until I was 27!
I feel this same sensation when it comes to HTTP streaming. Everyone’s been in a total tizzy about it lately, and Mr. Bitz is here to explain why it’s so important. Here’s what you need to know – there are several different ways that video can stream through your enterprise. Most video streams through your corporate network using the RTMP or Real Time Messaging Protocol (see this cool link for more on the real 411 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Video). Without getting into the crazy, mind-boggling details, the key thing to know about RTMP is that it is different (i.e. NOT the same) from Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP), the common protocol that is used to deliver Web content to your browser. In other words, a lot of video in your enterprise streams using a protocol that is not like the one that the vast majority of content in your network is using to get moved around.
Why does this matter? Mr. Bitz is going to give you the skinny. Chances are, if you work in a large enterprise, your network has all kinds of devices and infrastructure to speed up and optimize the flow of information traveling with HTTP. You will have all manner of caching devices, WAN accelerators, and so forth, to enable rapid and efficient transport of HTTP data all over the globe. Can RTMP video take advantage of that infrastructure? Nope, not a chance. It can’t gallop around the network like its footloose HTTP friends.
For this reason, if you can enable HTTP video streaming in your enterprise, you can power better delivery of video across your network. This mostly applies to video on demand (VOD). When people in your enterprise need to access VOD material, if it can stream with HTTP, the video content can be cached and optimized all over the place. Voila!
MediaPlatform has had success engaging with Fortune 1000 clients with its PrimeTime product, a media management/video content management solution that offers enterprises the opportunity to have a corporate YouTube-like video portal for their employees. When we show PrimeTime to prospective customers, we invariably get asked how the solution compares to systems that they already own, which handle tasks such as digital asset management (DAM), media asset management (MAM), knowledge management (KM), and enterprise content management (ECM.) These are very fair questions, especially since these solutions all tend to overlaps in certain basic ways. However, there are some clear differences, which we would like to expand upon here. Each solution type offers specialized functionality, and as is the case with so many of these discussions, one is not necessarily better than another. They just serve quite different purposes.
First, let’s define media management software as it is realized by PrimeTime and other comparable industry offerings. PrimeTime is a browser-based video-on-demand (VOD) application that enables corporate users to search for, share, view, and comment on video, much as they would in the public sphere with YouTube. The difference is that PrimeTime is private, with access controls, though one can also make a public channel on PrimeTime. PrimeTime has the ability to store video, though it can also point to video stored in other file repositories. This function helps clients avoid the hassle of migrating video content from one system to another if they adopt a media management solution such as PrimeTime.
Now, in contrast, here is how media management/video content management software compares to the other solutions:
- DAM/MAM – DAM systems, and their close cousins, media asset management (MAM) solutions, store video and audio content for search and retrieval. In those ways, they are similar to media management solutions such as PrimeTime. However, they differ in a couple of important ways. DAM/MAM are designed for sophisticated users in the marketing and advertising arenas, and they generally have a ton of advanced features related to color management, project tracking, and so forth. As a result, they tend to be a lot more expensive on a per-seat basis than a video content management system. Plus, DAM and MAM systems usually don’t have the kind of social networking, rating, and commenting aspects that you find in PrimeTime and other similar offerings in the industry.
- KM – Effective knowledge management is one of the benefits of a media management/video content management system. Yet, there are of course dedicated knowledge management solutions out there, some of which contain video-on-demand features. There is overlap with PrimeTime, but KM systems are typically more broad-based in their functionality, including knowledge taxonomy structures, text-based knowledge search, and so forth. All of this is of course great, but if one is trying to build an efficient, engaging VOD system, the KM solution is probably not the right fit.
- ECM – Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems are a staple of enterprise computing today. They are used to create a central location, usually connected to an intranet, where all kinds of documents, such as Word files, PDFs, images, and video can be stored, discovered, downloaded, and so forth. Many ECM systems also have workflow functionality, where documents can be moved through various approvals and drafts until a final, definitive version is ready for publications. The question then becomes, why would you need a video portal if you already have ECM on your intranet? The answer is that most ECM solutions simply do not offer the kind of intuitive video portal experience that PrimeTime and comparable solutions provide. There is a big difference between storing a video file on an ECM system and enabling people to browse, search by channel, comment, share, and so forth.
Greg Pulier, President of MediaPlatform, discusses how our cloud-based webcasting service has become completely democratized. Interview at ITEXPO’s Business Video Expo.
Each week we’ll be covering a topic based on our webcast, “Image Secrets of the Corporate Webcast” with Ken Molay, that features tips on how to create a successful Web event. These blog posts will be full of good ideas, so stay tuned each week for new nuggets of knowledge!
When you’re picking a location for your webcast shoot, it’s easy to fall into the trap of choosing a place that looks great in person but won’t necessarily look good in a webcast. Your instinct is probably to choose a place that’s familiar and comfortable, but before you settle in and set up the camera, take a look around. If you took a step back and scanned the area with a fresh eye, would this location be ideal in a webcast shoot? Does it look too busy or cluttered? Will the presenter be the only focal point in the shot? These are just a couple of questions you should consider before you pick a location, because as you’ll see below, it’s easy to make a mistake and choose one of the three worst places to shoot a webcast.
1. Messy Office – This seems pretty obvious, but when you’re sitting in the same office day in and day out, you forget about the piles of paperwork or scattered supplies strewn all over your office. To you, it might be organized clutter. But to someone stepping into your office for the first time, it could look like a complete mess. So if you were to shoot a webcast in your messy office, people might perceive you to be unprofessional and disorganized. That’s not the image you want to project, is it? You should instead choose a place that’s clean, tidy, and minimally decorated so that your viewers will have a positive impression of the set.
2. Public Space – Shooting a webcast in a public space can be distracting because you can’t control what goes on in the background. If you choose to shoot in your cubicle for example, the viewer might be able to see people walking around behind you or will be able to hear conversations and phones ringing. These can be highly distracting to viewers of a webcast who are trying to focus on the presenter and the message. Instead of shooting in an open space, choose a place that’s private with as few distractions as possible. Silence all telephones and notify people that you’re shooting a webcast so there won’t be any surprise guests showing up in your shot.
3. Window Backdrop – This setting is probably less obviously a poor choice than the two previously mentioned. What’s wrong with shooting a webcast in front of a clear window on a nice day, you might ask? Well for one thing, the presenter could look washed out or silhouetted when shot in front of a bright window. There can also be distractions outside, like birds or window washers, which while amusing, can seriously detract from the presenter. Reflections in the glass are also a distraction and should just be considered another deterrent to shooting in front of a window. Instead, a webcast should be shot against a plain background, with a minimal amount of light at your back.
Not shooting your webcast in the above three places will help ensure your event to be success. To watch the whole webcast, just click the button below.
Hybrid Flash multicasting is the second and decisive wave of innovation that will enable enterprises to stream video without overtaxing their network infrastructures. The first wave involved IP multicasting, which is a network technology that enables a video to stream just once to a node on a network and then is shared by all the viewers in that node, regardless of connection type or speed. IP multicasting, though effective, is entirely reliant on hardware upgrades, router configurations, and other network related factors, which makes it difficult and costly to implement initially.
Hybrid Flash multicasting solves the cost and complexity challenges of IP multicasting. By combining a new form of multicasting, known as “application multicasting,” which leverages a peer assisted model of video sharing, to an IP multicast network, a video stream can reach virtually everyone on the network using existing bandwidth and infrastructure. Hybrid multicasting finally unlocks the full potential for video within the enterprise by combining IP and application multicasting to deliver streaming media using the most efficient algorithms within a dynamic self-optimizing topology. Hybrid Flash multicasting offers a solution that eliminates the usual tradeoffs between video consumption and network investment, and has the potential to revolutionize the next generation of corporate rich media.
We work with many large organizations in enterprise webcasting and we’ve seen firsthand, the challenges in network management they face when it comes to enterprise video. One major challenge is the lack of bandwidth that data networks possess. Because online video files tend to be very large, it can severely disrupt network capabilities when a group of end users gather to watch a webcast streamed via unicast. This means that each viewer will receive a separate and dedicated stream for the webcast, which can overwhelm the availability of network capabilities. Multicasting, on the other hand, is a network technology for the delivery of online video to a group of destinations simultaneously and without dedicated streams. Multicasting uses the most efficient strategy to deliver the video stream over each link of the network only once, creating copies only when the links to the multiple destinations split. Multicasting was designed to make data-intensive video compatible with and better for corporate networks.
The figure above illustrates the problem with unicasting. When a network is not multicast enabled, every viewer of a video needs to receive his or her individual video stream from the media server. For a video that streams at 500 Kbps, just three simultaneous viewers over a unicast network will cause a T1 connection to crash. As a result, most companies will simply not allow any video to be viewable within their organizations. If these companies were to utilize multicasting technology, a video stream would flow to just one node on the network which then gets shared by all viewers in that node.
