I recently spoke as part of the CEO showcase at the AlwaysOn OnHollywood event this week which took place in Hollywood, of course. This was a great event featuring a wide variety of new media executives, VC’s, and content creators talking about the forces that are disrupting user behavior and creating new opportunities, content strategies and monetization schemes in the video, music, gaming, search, and mobile industries.
Following my presentation I talked briefly with a reporter for Texas TechPulse. For those that don’t know, RipCode is headquartered in Dallas with an engineering office in Austin, Texas. So as you may guess, Texas TechPulse is focused on providing news and information about deal flow, high tech investment, and high tech companies in Texas. For a quick read, and to learn a bit more about RipCode, take a look at the TechPulse interview.
I’ve talked to a lot of companies recently about their video transcoding needs and most are eager to support an increased number of encoding profiles. But as their video library grows, they forsee challenges in encoding their back catalog to support new profiles while keeping up with transcoding their daily ingest. In this video, I’ve whiteboarded an example of the pre-transcoding challenge. I think it will help further your understanding as to why companies with growing video libraries should consider On-Demand Transcoding to reduce the cost and complexities of delivering video to multiple formats.
RipCode CEO, Brendon Mills talks with Texas Instruments’ Niels Anderskouv while demoing On-Demand Transcoding for mobile as part of the Texas Intstruments’ Worldwide Developer Conference.
Last week RipCode exhibited at the CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas. This was our first year at this show, and considering our booth location was less than optimal – our fault for signing up late – we had good foot traffic and we’re kept busy talking with visitors and demoing our On-Demand Transcoding solution for mobile video. We got a lot of positive reaction to our message. It’s obvious that delivering video to mobile is a challenge for many companies. As we describe our unique transcoding methodology, people are really excited by the possibilities of expanding their video library to any video platform - without the increased cost of storage, energy or hardware usage. For more information on RipCode’s On-Demand Transcoding solution for mobile video, check out our video overview.
We also announced the availability of RipCode’s On-Demand Signaling Server. If you missed the news last week, you can check out the full press release on our website. The On-Demand Signaling Server is a complement to RipCode’s Video Transcoding Appliance and is designed to function as the intelligent network and workflow manager for multiple RipCode appliances. Tim Siglin from Streaming Media Magazine interviewed me prior to the show regarding the announcement. You can check out the complete interview from Tim’s podcast podcast.
Also a big highlight for us from the show was our sponsorship of the FierceWireless party for CTIA attendees at Rain Nightclub at The Palms. For pictures from the event, check out the FierceWireless website. Congratulations again to Josh Wittman from Red Eye. He was the recipient of our raffle drawing for a Sony PSP.
Overall, it was a great week at CTIA. Now, we’ll be heading back to Las Vegas again next week for the NAB show. And maybe we can win some of our money back…or not.
Last Monday I officially joined RipCode as Vice President of Software Development. After more than 25 years in the telecom equipment industry it was time for a change. In life change is a certainty and while changes in careers can result in hesitancy and even anxiety it is also an opportunity to re-energize.
User generated video, social networking and mobile video are expanding markets. Conjointly they are explosive. With this explosion comes a whole new set of technical and business complexities. RipCode has a truly unique set of solutions that will change the way content providers distribute video to the mass market.
RipCode’s unique solutions and the opportunity to re-launch my career in this impressive market space are the primary reasons I have joined the company. I am very excited to be part of the RipCode team and the changes that we providing the customer. I look forward to utilizing my experience to help the company be a huge success and hope to occassionally drop in and share my new perspective and thoughts on the industry and technology developments.
Today we bring you the last video is a series of conversations that I had with Dr. Gerry Purdy, VP and Chief Analyst with Frost & Sullivan. In this session, we discuss encoding as a routable protocol and the growth in multi-format transcoding. Dr. Purdy also gives us his view of how On-Demand Transcoding will impact the future of the transcoding market and we wrap up our conversation with thoughts on monetizing video content.
I hope you enjoyed this 4 part series. We plan to keep bringing in special guests from time to time to share their thoughts and opinions. So, send us your comments, we definitely want to hear from you.
In Part 3 of my conversation with Dr. Gerry Purdy, VP and Chief Analyst with Frost & Sullivan, we discuss the global growth of mobile video, the impact of unlimited data plans on the mobile video market, and regulatory contraints that are impeding new mobile applications and services.
If you haven’t yet seen Parts 1 and 2 of my discussion with Dr. Purdy, I encourage you to take a few minutes to watch. Stay tuned for Part 4, which is the final video in the series.
Yesterday on Contentinople, Frank Smith talked about a comment that YouTube’s Philip Inghelbrecht made during a Digital Hollywood Media Summit in New York. He remarked that 10 hours of fresh content is uploaded to YouTube every minute…wow! Frank’s post also went on to talk about the strain the volume of new media content is putting on storage, exceeding current capabilities, with an estimated 281 billion Gbytes uploaded in 2007 based on an IDC study sponsored by EMC Corp.
This really underscores what we’ve talked about on this blog before, and what we’ve been hearing from content providers, UGC sites and syndicators. As video libraries continue to grow, operators are faced with hardware, storage and energy costs associated with keeping up with Web 2.0 consumer behavior and appetite for rich media content on multiple screens. So as more file space and computing resources are consumed in duplicating content over and over again to support viewers demand for video in a variety of formats, how do you find what you’re looking for amongst all the clutter?
In addition to reducing the strain on storage capacity, On-Demand Transcoding minimizes the search problem through drastically optimized storage infrastructure. By transcoding video files on demand, there are significantly fewer files to have to search, which creates an easier and more efficient search effort. With 281B GB uploaded last year and growing, this problem is more than a little real.
Yesterday I participated in a panel discussion at SXSW Interactive in Austin. The panel was called “Crunching and Streaming: Online Video Distribution Challenge and Opportunity”. I saw that a few people including Terry Storch and Daryl McMullen have thought enough of the discussion to include a mention on their sites. My fellow panelists included:
Sloan Foster, Armida Technologies
Todd Byant, Netcast HD
Ashley Manning, Adobe Systems
Jeff Kramer, Polycot Labs
The focus was on the challenges and opportunities associated with the evolution of video delivery. We discussed new video compression technologies available such as H.264 that are improving video quality. It was a really interesting discussion, especially around the licensing of codecs – commercial vs. freeware – and whether royalty-free codecs can provide the same or better compression than commercial solutions. We also talked about how technology has finally evolved to enable the convergence of video and the reality of truly ubiquitous viewing.
Overall, I thought it was a good discussion and hope the audience felt the same. I think they’re will be a podcast of the panel session available soon – when it’s live we’ll post a link to it from the RipCode site. Thanks again to everyone that attended and participated in the discussion.
We’ve received great feedback in response to Part 1 of our interview series with Dr. Gerry Purdy, Vice President and Chief Analyst with Frost & Sullivan. In Part 2 we begin discussing the impact that the iPhone and YouTube have had on the mobile user experience. We also talk about the opportunities and the complexities of mass video distribution across all three screens - Internet, mobile and IPTV.
We hope you’re enjoying the series. Look for Parts 3 and 4 coming soon…
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