Tag: hardcore-video

Blank Canvas

Incredulity is giving way to disbelief as the BBC tries to finally explain what the heck it is doing spending licence payer’s money developing video management platforms in direct competition with commercial players such as BT.

However, Canvas is likely to be well received by the hardware industry, all of whom are keen to control the EPGs on their devices, but haven’t got a clue how to develop the required software.
The result is that we (the licence payers) are subsidising the hardware manufacturers to enable them to take on the incumbents such as Sky, Virgin and BT. The provision for payment on the platform is particularly problematic.
More competition should be a good thing for viewers in the marketplace, but the role of the BBC remains highly questionable.


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Blank Canvas

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Bouncing Back From The Grave

Video technology company Arqiva has indicated that it is going to enter the VoD longform market after buying the assets of Kangaroo. The company already has relationships with most broadcasters and is potentially well placed to get a ‘Kangaroo-like’ service in place, albeit after the launch of Hulu in the UK.

Meanwhile, more news reaches me of Canvas, the erstwhile BBC speced ultra-secretive, ‘open source’ initiative; apparently it will use HTML5 and Flash Lite and will be far from the lightweight, standards based platform that it claims to be.


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Bouncing Back From The Grave

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Independent Action

It’s a tough time to be an independent production company. In fact, it’s always a tough time to be an independent production company, especially a small one. Here’s the Editor of Broadcast magazine writing online: “Almost half the respondents (44%) are letting staff go and almost two-thirds (62%) are cutting the number of production staff. Some 76% believe the repercussions are already visible on screen while a massive 95% believe the impact will be clearly visible within the next 12 months.”

But the reality is that it’s never been a better time to be in video production. The demand for video is going through the roof as it becomes a much more mainstream mode of communication. The problem is that in the new video world the clients are corporate and they need something more than the ability to produce video and tell stories; they need marketing skills and the ability to target and analyse audiences.
In fact, probably the single biggest step independent production companies need to take is to get in touch with their audiences. Indeed, the future security of indies will depend on their ability to build direct audiences and then deliver these to marketeers, broadcasters or service operators.
It’s not very different to the effect that blogs have had on the publishing world where the traditional arbitrators have been disintermediated.


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Independent Action

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Fine Definitions

Definitions are fine things. By ‘fine’ I don’t mean good – rather I mean marginal.

A single definition can be worth billions under the law, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the rights industry.
This became apparent with the final ruling on the ‘Cablevision DVR‘ case which handed a massive win to cable operators and content distributors.
You see, the problem with running a cable TV or IPTV service is that you have to build, install and maintain complicated and expensive boxes that are these days a bit like PCs; these boxes need to run 24 x 7 x 365 and you need to update them regularly.
All of the intelligence of the cable industry is currently transferred to the living room before the viewer can benefit from it.
Broadly speaking the Cablevision DVR ruling states that there is no difference between a viewer recording something locally or recording something remotely.
So, as we move into a world where all ‘TV sets’ will have a broadband connection and a processor, the cablecos are now free to get rid of these pesky boxes. If you want to ‘record’ something in reality all the cableco/IPTV service has to do is to tag this on a server. When you play your ‘recording’ all the tag does is call the video file. Much cheaper and much easier – and frees a lot of the cable capacity.
But back to definitions – what’s the difference between a ‘tagged PVR recording’ and a ‘video on demand’. As far as I can tell, and as far as the US Courts seem concerned, there is none.


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Fine Definitions

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Hardcore Video

Adding a video to a website isn’t tough, but launching a television station is. Getting an Internet TV service off the ground comes somewhere in between, but is still scarily as complex as launching a proper TV service, albeit with different considerations.

Here are some of the services you’ll need to set up:

A CDN (Content Deliver Network) – generally you’ll work with an established provider unless you have a seven figure budget – but even these need a huge degree of integration

Application Server – to run your video management system – preferably you’ll need four of these in two different locations with load balancers in front of them

Database Cluster – to handle the data management; again, having two in different locations is ideal if possible

Firewalls – to stop attacks on your application and content

DRM Server – to protect your content and how it can be distributed; you might also need an IP resolving service for territorial control and geo-targeting

DNS Server – you’ll need to control the naming and URLs for your service

Local Encoders – to encode your videos locally

Encoder Farm – for remote encoding and user generated video

System Monitoring – to ensure that your service is available and to alert of any problems

SVC – version control so that various staff can work on upgrading different aspects of the system

Issues Tracking – to log any client or user issues or requests

Player Servers – to host the pages delivering the web service; you may also need separate systems beyond the application server to host web services

Then there’s the promotional website, support website and you begin to get an idea of how complex this can become.

And you still might need the studios and the edit suites to produce all the content.

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Hardcore Video

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