by
David Nagel
Executive
Producer
dnagel@digitalmedianet.com
I lie to you
not. I went out to the Streaming Media West convention in Long
Beach last week (against my better judgement, but I'll get to
that in a moment). This is one of those shows where practically
the only companies in attendance are there to beg for venture
capital. You know the kind. (I went on at length about this around
last Internet World. Streaming Media West is the same thing.)
So, anyway, after I get done at this show, what do you suppose
I find on my windshield when I reach the parking lot?
A prospectus.
I lie to you
not. Some company hired some guy to go around to all the cars
in the Long Beach Convention Center parking lot and place a prospectus
on their windshields. As if raising venture capital were like
advertising a discount car wash.
What a joke.
But, on the
positive side, the Streaming Media West show this season was virtually
dead. Why is this a positive thing? It means that all those companies
I hate are going out of business. You know the ones I'm talking
about—those "end to end solution providers" who
want to "synergize my paradigm in [fill in the blank] market
space." These are the companies that have posed the biggest
problems for anything having to do with the Internet. All their
"cyber" this and "revolutionizing" that propaganda
has been driving me nuts for years, and it's turned the Internet
into one big cliché. So I'm glad to see them go, and I
spit on their graves.
So you ask,
"Dave, if you hate these people so much, what made you go
to this convention and waste your precious time on these Doc Marten's-clad
MBAs?"
Look, you
and I both know the only thing interesting about the Web happens
on the front end, the creative end. And we also know that these
types of conventions cater to the exact opposite—the back
end, or the butts of the industry, if you will. Nevertheless,
with a little bit of digging, we can part through these back ends
and find some real golden treasures. (Did that sound like an anatomical
pun? I'll stop that now.)
QuickTime,
Sorenson 3 and MPEG 4
For example, my first stop wasn't even on the show floor. It was
in a meeting room near the exit. And it was with Apple,
the folks who made all of this computer graphics stuff possible.
They took some time out of their busy schedule to let me in on
a couple little secrets. No. 1 is the fact that we will soon (within
a couple or three weeks) see the Sorenson 3 CODEC included as
a free upgrade in QuickTime 5.
They also
showed off a pre-beta version of QuickTime 5 with MPEG 4 support—both
playback and export. The quality was a bit rough, but, when it's
all finished, you better believe streaming video is going to be
a part of every Web designer's responsibilities. Better start
boning up on your video editing skills. This stuff is happening
soon. Look for more info on QuickTime and MPEG 4 around October.
Cleaner
on speed
For those of you who are already in the streaming medium, you
will be happy to learn of some news on the compression front.
Media 100,
the company that bought Media Cleaner Pro (now called simply Cleaner)
from Terran Interactive had some happy tidings to report. It seems
the company's Cleaner 5 product will soon get ICE acceleration
in the form of a new board called Crystal ICE. This isn't terribly
new news, but the fact that it's about to go into beta testing
is. Those of you who have worked with the previous ICE'd version
of Cleaner (Media Cleaner Power Suite) know just how much faster
compression can be with a little help from some add-on hardware.
The extra bonus? Unlike Media Cleaner Pro 4, Cleaner 5 isn't hindered
by the 2 GB file size limit, and, of course, it can encode interactivity
into any streaming file.
Now, on the
side of things I usually don't cover, Media 100 also signed a
deal with Globix to provide hosting services for Cleaner Live,
the company's Windows-only live streaming suite. Why do I mention
this? It's a pretty decent deal. If you do live streaming with
Cleaner 5, you'll now get hosting service starting around $250.
For those of you who've done this before, you know that's practically
free. What's the catch? There doesn't seem to be one. You pay
your $250, you get a test run, you get your stream and you get
a live customer service person on the phone with you throughout
the Webcast. Not too shabby. Now, if Apple would just release
their QuickTime API for Windows, we could get this thing streaming
some real media instead of that other stuff from vendors I won't
mention.
By the way,
there's also a multi-node version of Cleaner Live in the works.
It too will be in beta soon. Stay tuned for more.
Ultimate
audio
Finally, there was also some good stuff in the way of audio. I
know you probably don't think too much about it, but SRSWOWcast
has some incredible technology for encoding low-bandwidth audio
with a high-bandwidth sound. It's really something you're going
to have to hear to believe, so stop by their site and check out
some of their demos. (The demos are in Windows Media format, but
the technology works on any audio source.) SRSWOWcast introduced
both software and hardware for enhancing audio. The software lets
you clean up voice, add bass, mess around with 5.1 simulation
and do a whole bunch of other stuff that turns really bad audio
into really good audio. The hardware does the same thing, but
it does it on the fly. Think Internet radio. You play the source
through SRSWOWcast's box, tweak some knobs and switches, and you're
on your way to full-bodied sound without the download time.
Final thoughts
So I've mentioned here that the streaming media and general Internet
conventions seem to be in a serious state of decline. Does this
mean that streaming is dead? Nope. In fact, demand for streaming
media is at an all-time high. It just means that those annoying
middlemen and back-end "solution" providers are going
to have to look for another venue for scamming investments.
And so that
about wraps it up for this latest (and possibly second to last)
Streaming Media West expo. Look for more rants about back-end
companies (and possibly some more anatomical puns) after the next
Internet World, which happens in mid-July.
