Indie Telco Local Content Workshop Information
Quick Jump Menu to this Issue’s Articles November 3rd, 2004 Overview Heads California, Tails Carolina: A Real Interesting Approach to Streaming: Don’t Like the News? Go Out and Make Your Own!:
A Real Interesting Approach to Streaming
by Ken Pyle ([email protected]), Viodi, LLC
November 3, 2004 Issue
An advantage to living in the 11th largest city in the country, the so-called capitol of Silicon Valley, is that technology conferences and seminars are plentiful, making it pretty convenient for yours truly. So, I was a bit disappointed when I realized that I had to make the 45 mile trek to that smaller berg to the North, San Francisco, if I wanted to attend the Real Networks seminar. Actually, the drive isn’t the problem, it is paying the $20 for 4 hours of parking and dealing with the chanting of protesters once one gets to Baghdad by the Bay [yes, for some reason, this is a nickname some people use for San Francisco]. Despite the drawbacks associated with its location, this seminar was well worth the time.
Like any conference, the most relevant presentations tend to be those given by users. This seminar featured some interesting case studies from two of Real’s customers; football rivals University of California at Berkeley and Stanford. It was clear that Internet video is becoming a critical part of the learning environments in these institutes of higher learning. The speaker from Cal suggested that they had a million views in the Spring Semester of 2004; a view being defined as someone watching a clip for a minute or more.
Currently, they store something like a terabyte of videos from various college courses. Students and others then have the opportunity to review classes they may have physically or mentally missed. One of Cal’s goals is to begin indexing the files, such that students can easily jump to a particular section of a lecture. Stanford is using the video capability to leverage their medical school. Demand is coming from the medical students, who often view the content in 2x and 4x real-time.
Real’s partner companies each gave brief presentations of their capabilities. They have partners that provide video capture solutions, Digital Asset Management solutions (critical when you have thousands of files like Cal), reporting and video presentation software. Serious Magic demonstrated a product that allows anyone to look like a professional newscaster. Serious Magic always has a fun presentation.
Real has changed a great deal in the past few years. They have turned much of their code over to the open source community. This has spurred the porting of the Real player to multiple operating systems, including Linux, Palm and the Mac. Their server will not only play out Real files, but Quicktime, Windows and MPEG files as well. Art Hawkins, General Manager for North American System Sales suggested that their player and Helix Digital Rights Management solution will be available in future set-top boxes.
Another interesting thing about Real is that they have a service aspect to their business with over 1 million subscribers to their various video and music services. One of the most interesting of these services is Starz, which provides an SVOD service, for those people that have at least 600 kilobits per second downstream. This service makes 150 movies available for $12.95 per month. It is not too difficult to imagine this service being delivered to Internet-connected set-top boxes and, hence, being an alternative method of delivering video to the home.
For those telcos that are interested in experimenting with the Real product, there is a starter server package and producer that allows entities with fewer than 50 people to host the Real Server.
http://www.realnetworks.com/products/programs/business.html
To move beyond experimentation and be able to support multiple media files, a server upgrade would be needed, as well as integration with some of the third-party management and reporting tools that Real featured in their seminar. If any IOCs are interested in experimenting with the Real package and need some videos, let me know and Viodi can supply some short video clips.
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