“A lot of the broadcasters used to have websites as a marketing arm to their core TV business,” according to Lakana‘s president Phillip Hyun. “Now that digital has really become a real viable business, a lot of the marketers are seeing their digital strategies having to be run as real businesses.”
St Paul, Minnesota-based Lakana was formed in April when Nexstar Broadcasting Group merged three of its units – Internet Broadcasting Systems, EndPlay and Inergize Digital – to create a multiplatform company supporting broadcaster efforts.
Hyun says Lakana powers the websites and digital initiatives of around 250 local US TV channels and has a combined audience of 100 to 130 million people. When those channels want to publish thousands of videos each day and breaking news streams, cost can become prohibitive, he says.
We interviewed Hyun at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>The Chicago-based consultancy was amongst the firms to have developed dash.js, a Javascript library that helps web publishers embed video players for the emerging MPEG-DASH standard.
That might not sound particularly exciting, but consider that, just a few short years ago, web-based video delivery relied on plugins like RealVideo or Flash. Now MPEG-DASH and HLS are amongst the video codecs that deliver video over standard HTTP web connections, no special tools required.
“We’ve been building applications for many different clients around the world and we’re finding people are really interested in standardization,” Digital Primates founding partner Jeff Tapper tells Beet.TV in this video interview. The company has recently been presenting on how to build HTML5-based web video players.
We interviewed Tapper at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>“We’ve started seeing growth not only in traffic on the network but growth in individual bitrates,” Akamai product management and operations VP Michael Fay tells Beet.TV executive producer Andy Plesser in this video interview.
“2014, we saw about 2.3Mbits (per second) average bitrate being streamed, but we’re seeing a lot more audiences for a lot more devices growing to four and five Mbit streams, on the journey to a 4K experience, which might be a 12Mbit stream.”
Akamai traditionally places its network optimization technology on infrastructure nodes that handle traffic before it gets to consumers. Now it also hopes network device makers will place the tech on devices consumers use in the home, easing network congestion and making 4K transmission more likely.
Last month, the firm acquired online video quality optimization firm Octoshapes in another bid to transmit high-quality video.
We interviewed Fay at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>Speaking with Beet.TV in this video interview, Adobe product management senior director Bill Roberts says the recently-announced “Project Candy” allows users to capture a color set using their smartphone camera for use in desktop video editing.
“Quite often, you want to capture the mood of a moment,” Roberts says. “If you’re at the beach at sunset, and you’ve got this glorious orange sky… that would be a great way to warm up a video interview.
With new Project Candy, I’m able to capture the colour and light, select the elements of the light that I want to exchange and save it. That look is immediately available to me when I jump in to Premier, After Effects of Premier Clip. The cloud should be something that’s seamless that makes your life better.
Additionally, Adobe Premier Pro CC introduces a new transition, Morph Cut, which lets editors blend moves between jump cuts, effectively eliminating the disparity between separate scenes.
We interviewed Roberts at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>TouchCast is a tablet video editing application that lets producers add interactive elements like photos, text, articles and web pages inside playing videos.
Revealing new features, TouchCast product manager Charley Miller tells Beet.TV it now supports “running external cameras in to the iPad so they can shoot on a really nice camera and get the depth-of-field that they are used to, making beautiful video but use TouchCast as a video mixer”.
One of those cameras, however, can be an iPhone. Miller shows how iOS devices can be used not just to produce but to input video in for inclusion in TouchCasts. Wall Street Journal is already beginning to use the functionalities.
We interviewed Miller at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>The outfit has added live capability to its MainStage platform, following a partnership with Nowtilus.
Company sales and marketing SVP Malachi Bierstein says the idea is to reduce complexity in a fragmented world for broadcasters: “It is pretty complex but it doesn’t have to be.
“(Customers) want to be across the breadth of popular connected devices, they want to be able to offer business models like SVOD, EST, TVOD, live linear, ad-supported.”
Clients of London-, LA- and Tokyo-based Saffron include ITV and Sky, KDDI and NBCUniversal.
We interviewed Bierstein at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>The MPEG-DASH standard, which can use adaptive-bitrate streaming to scale quality regardless of connection speed over standard HTTP servers, is gaining supporters. But Apple’s HLS format remains influential, says digital video infrastructure security vendor Verimatrix‘s marketing SVP Steve Christian.
“It’s likely we’re going to be running implementations of HTTP Live Streaming in parallel with DASH for some while to come,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “That’s a consequence of different standards and proprietary implementations across the world of devices. That’s going to take a couple of years to sort out.
“In a couple of years time, the industry is likely to fully support the DASH standard … rather than deal with many, many code bases.” Here is how the two standards shape up against one another.
San Diego-based Verimatrix makes technology that supports content protection and “revenue security” for video owners, including watermarking so Christian likes what he sees in DASH – “the ability to reach many different kinds of devices and support multiple kinds of common encryption systems”.
We interviewed Griffioen at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
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