The Adobe AIR based, multi-platform, iPlayer serves (geo-blocked) BBC TV and radio content from the previous seven days and has dramatically popularised UK time-shifting. According to figures released on the BBC’s website last month, iPlayer was taking 114 million programme requests in July (with the FIFA World Cup and motoring show Top Gear proving the most popular).

One of the hurdles Thompson, and the BBC, will have to overcome, in offering a truly global VOD service, is the current licencing agreement they have in place with independent producers.

The Independent TV producers’ trade group Pact has told paidContent:UK that Thompson’s idea has not been agreed with industry, and it will oppose the plan. John McVay, CEO of Pact went on to say that: “The terms of trade DO NOT allow for the iPlayer to be accessed outside of the UK as this cuts across the commercial rights of independent producers” Thompson responded by saying that: “It’s the right time to take a fresh look at whether the current terms are fit for purpose…we may need more flexibility from the producers.”

By laying down a 12-month deadline, Thompson has effectively set a clock for his team (and independent producers) to embrace what he said is a new global opportunity for British TV makers: “British ideas are no longer strangers in LA and the world’s other media capitals.” For now, though, the opportunity to profit from shows popular in the U.S., like Doctor Who and Top Gear, is going begging online.

An intriguing technical challenge faced by the BBC in offering a global iPlayer service will be the implementation of a system by which non-UK IP addresses can identify themselves as UK license fee payers for ‘catch-up’ TV.

UK culture minister Jeremy Hunt said that due to the increasingly popular uptake of television being watched via catch-up services, the UK government needed to ‘rethink’ the licence fee model(s) associated with ‘catch-up’ TV. These services currently don’t not require the payment of the licence fee, but he admitted that his administration will need to find a way to stop people consuming material paid for by the licence fee for free. He ruled out introducing a licence fee for PCs.

This sentiment is shared by BBC’s governing body the BBC Trust who expressed concern last year about the increasing number of viewers watching catch-up services and said that rules on licences should be clearer.

Watch this space…

One reason, could be the recent spat between Apple and Adobe, and Steve Jobs’ lack of support for Flash Player on the iPad/iPhone. This alone, would seem to be valid grounds for Brightcove to evolve their platform to support for HTMl5.

Another reason, could be ubiquity of playback – something the Flash Platform has prided itself on for years. An ethos consolidated by Jeremy Allaire in a recent press release where he stated that -”our customers want to be able to deliver their video content to every screen without sacrificing the quality, interactivity and monetization capabilities they have come to expect from the Brightcove platform – The Brightcove Experience for HTML5 fills the gap between the current playback capabilities of the emerging standard and what our customers need to operate successful online video business.”

Allaire goes on to say that “the problem space for most publishers of video is not just about getting content to play back… the expectations for publishers of video have grown to include a lot of different things.” The pieces to the video experience (beyond simply pushing pixels to the screen) include player UI, branding, analytics & monetization/ad strategies, to name a few. HTML5 doesn’t yet have all the components of the toolkit to enable those features. “Ultimately what’s necessary is that the industry needs to have this whole stack… of what people expect in the overall user experience of video, to be accessible and available in the HTML5 world,”

The initial version of the Brightcove tools for HTML5 will provide a basic playback template, but updates later in 2010 will add player template cutomization, advertising tools and analytics. HTML5 support will also work on Android phones. It’s important to keep in mind that whilst Brightcove’s HTML5 platform doesn’t aim to replace Flash – it automatically switches to an HTML5 version of the video when a device isn’t detected that can’t play Flash, but the goal is to have users (and publishers) not care about whether Flash is present.

Brightcove already has existing relationships with some of the world’s leading media companies including Fox Entertainment Group, Sony Pictures Television International, Time Warner, and many others. Two of these, The New York Times (A Brightcove investor) and Time magazine, have both reportedly signed on to use Brightcove’s new offering. According to Brightcove senior vice president of marketing Jeff Whatcott  a majority of Brightcove’s thousand-plus clients will begin rolling out HTML5 sites for iPhone OS devices later this spring, too”.

All of this raises an interesting point – will Steve Jobs mission to change the way people browse the web (on Flash free devices) actually succeed. By way of companies such as Brightcove providing solutions to enable customers to work around the lack of Flash support on devices such as the iPad/iPhone.

To facilitate quality of service (QoS), Amazon uses uses their S3 as the origin server to store the original, definitive versions of your content. Then uses 14 globally located (US, Europe, Hong Kong, and Japan) edge servers to stream content into the various geographies. Requests for your objects are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance.

CloudFront has minimum commitments or up-front fees, and prices are extremely reasonable. With (US hosted) content streaming starting at US$0.150 per GB/month for the first 10 TB,  dropping to US$0.030 per GB for transfers over 1000 TB/month.

CloudFront uses Adobe’s Flash Media Streaming Server (FMSS) 3.5.2 which, unlike its older brother FMIS (Flash Media Interactive Server), doesn’t support server-side ActionScript or the C++ plug-in framework – both of which are required for developing custom streaming solutions and multiway communication services. It does however, support the RTMP, RTMPT (HTTP tunneled), RTMPE (encrypted), and RTMPTE (tunneled and encrypted) protocols.

Setting-up and streaming your content with CloudFront is a pretty straight forward process, and Larry Bouthillier has a great step-by-step article on the process over at Streaming Media;

1. Create an account on the AWS Simple Storage Service (S3)
2. Create a storage repository on S3 to store your media files
3. Upload your content to your S3 repository
4. Configure your permissions (via Amazon’s Cloudfront AWS Management Console, their Cloudfront API’s, or a number of third-party management tools) to allow public access
5. Configure your Cloudfront streaming distribution so that points at your S3 storage repository
6. Embed your Flash media player of choice in a web page, with a link back to the media file in CloudFront
7. Now you’re ready to globally stream content!

One ‘potential’ downside to CloudFront is that it doesn’t employ SLAs, which may concern business’ that rely on high QoS. Having said that, Amazon does have two levels of premium support that costs between $100-$400 a month for customers who want 27×7 phone support.

CloudFront doesn’t currently offer support for live Flash streaming, but Amazon has indicated that they will be rolling out support for this service sometime in 2010.

Dan Rayburn mentioned that “After downloading a Zune video app, you can browse through movies available in 1080p and new to the movie service, you can choose to stream or download the movies. If you select streaming, the Zune app does a quick check of your connection to tell you if you can get the 1080p content and once you purchase the movie, the buffer time before it starts is less than a second. When Microsoft says that the new Zune video technology allows for “instant-on” streaming, they aren’t kidding.”

Microsoft has recommend a minimum of 4 Mbps for the full 1080p/5.1 experience but the great thing about the technology is that videos will automatically scale to the best possible resolution based on the speed of the users internet connection.

The Zune Video on Xbox LIVE takes advantage of Microsoft’s Smooth Streaming technology, which is a feature of IIS Media Services. The Zune Video was built from the ground-up for the Xbox 360 platform. While the Silverlight plug-in also takes advantage of Smooth Streaming technology, Silverlight is not being used on the Xbox platform.

Microsoft says that Zune video on Xbox LIVE features a state-of-the-art encoder and high performance decoder that allows them to offer instant on 1080p video and 5.1 surround sound with Smooth Streaming playback and smooth fast-forward and rewind functionality. They aren’t giving out any details yet on how the videos are encoded and what the settings are, but I expect we’ll hear more about that when the service launches to the public. Microsoft also said that they recommend a minimum of 4 Mbps for the full 1080p/5.1 experience but the great thing about the technology is that videos will automatically scale to the best possible resolution based on the speed of the users internet connection.

According to a recent report from Adobe EMEA Flash Platform Evangelist Andrew Shorten – “whilst having no inside knowledge as to what caused ITV to walk away from Microsoft’s technology it seems though that a combination of technical problems experienced by end-users and the relatively low distribution of the the runtime, which required most visitors to install Silverlight, proved to be too much of a barrier for end-user adoption”

Another report, indicated that the ITV Player was the least attractive of the online TV services offered by the four main British broadcasters (BBC, C4, and Five). Picture quality was reported to be closer to YouTube fuzziness than the quality of BBC’s iPlayer. The browser window for viewing is also on the small size and the full screen option is a non-starter due to a blocky pixelated screen.

ITV initially launched ITV Player as a direct response to BBC’s iPlayer and Sky’s on-demand service. The video-on-demand section of ITV.com, formally know as Catch Up, allows users to view a selection of the best ITV shows for 30 days and has seen a rapid rise in users, with the average number of plays per month increasing by 3354% since it launched. UK cable operator, Virgin Media, said Monday that ITV Player, generated over 4 million on-demand views in the first full month after its launch on Virgin’s VOD platform.

This is the second high profile customer Microsoft have lost to Adobe’s Platform this year. With, Major League Baseball’s MLB.com also dropping Silverlight, earlier in the year, in favour of Flash. With baseball executives saying that Silverlight was too unstable for a profitable subscription service.

Jim Guerard, vice president and general manager of Dynamic Media at Adobe outlined how “With Adobe Flash Access 2.0, media publishers can rely on robust protection for premium content to support new, emerging business models for rich interactive online experiences,” For example, Flash Access 2.0 will provide a way for media companies to enforce user constraints, such as limiting viewing to a given rental period.

Adobe Flash Access 2.0 comes as a Software Development Kit that facilitates Internet deployment and integration into software and services such as order management, subscription databases, access control, and LDAP-based Active Directories. Flash Access will also be available as a Software as a Service (SaaS) through certain Adobe partners that will offer hosted content protection to multiple clients.

Flash Access 2.0 supports standards-based MPEG 4 (H.264) content as well as the FLV file format through progressive download, streaming, and download for local playback. It will also support digital, and analog ,output protection technologies—including HDCP, CGMS-A, and Rovi (formerly Macrovision®) ACP—for Windows platforms.

Flash Access 2.0 will allow the play back protected content securely on an upcoming new version of Adobe Flash Player, and outside the browser via Adobe AIR, and is scheduled to ship in the first half of 2010.

The United States Tennis Association (USTA) is offering tennis fans, live streaming of the 2009 US Open from the Arthur Ashe Stadium. The interactive HD streaming is further enhanced by the offering of a picture-in-picture feature and real-time stats.

The site also leverages IBM’s Flash powered Slam Tracker, which lets users track player progression, schedules and scores for the entire tournament. Slam Tracker’s scoreboard “pushes” point-by-point scoring, live draw results, match and serve stats, player information and tracking, as well as interactive venue maps and live streaming radio.

In a recent interview with Phil Green, the USTA’s senior director of advanced media, Mr Green mentioned how excited he was about the advances in technology at this year’s US Open. “Our goal is to bring the U.S. Open to tennis fans in any way that they can access it. Offering this live online is a tremendous asset for the fan and the USTA.”

The USTA’s technology partner IBM has done an impressive job of augmenting disparate streaming media sources into a single rich internet application – even including USOpen.org radio, which goes to the control booth at Arthur Ashe stadium, with a live tennis play by play commentary whenever a matche is on. They’ve also integrated an “Ask The Booth” feature — where users can ask questions to the on-air announcers.

Despite CBS being the broadcast partner of choice for the regular series broadcast, the USTA recently signed a new agreement with ESPN2 and USA. Part of the agreement allows the USTA to leverage ESPN2′s streaming services (which utilise Flash and Move Networks) to offer live streaming to U.S. Open to tennis fans (located in the US).

When asked if he was worried about losing out on television advertising revenue by also having all of the events online – Mr Green replied “In essence, you’re not cannibalizing your TV audience by watching online. As CBS’ March Madness or MLB Baseball have shown, you’re only enhancing the product. At the end of the day, if people have a 50-inch plasma or 19-inch computer, what are they going to watch? As good as our video is going to be, a 50-inch plasma will be better. This enhances what’s on TV, and people are more likely to watch when they do get in front of the TV”

The US Open runs from August 31st – September 13 at Arthur Ashe Stadium, New York

The Ultimate Fighting Championships (UFC) are going to start trialing a new streaming service powered by Silverlight, and Internet Information Services (IIS) Smooth Streaming, for UFC #102 on August 29th. They are still using Flash Media Server for streaming pre-recorded and live events, and have added Silverlight to their streaming client arsenal, in an effort to to reach the broadest possible audience.

Another reason behind the addition of Silverlight is a new partnership with CSG Systems to leverage their Content Direct Platform. According to reports over at the Silverlight Team’s blog – “CSG’s Content Direct Platform enables content owners to monetize their content through subscription, pay per use and advertising model on both their sites, and their syndication partner site, to stream their pre-fight weigh-ins on UFC.com and many partner sites across the globe.  UFC also uses Content Direct to sell, protect and stream their pay-per-view fights on UFC.com and other partner sites globally. ”

“CSG implemented Smooth Streaming into Content Direct earlier this year, and is currently participating in the beta for Live Smooth Streaming with Microsoft and Akamai. Content Direct, using Smooth Streaming, will enable UFC to provide their customers with the best viewing experience possible, based on the customer’s available bandwidth and machine resources.  This is important as consumers of this high-action, high-value content expect a great online experience, and expect content to be clear, stutter-free and be provided at the highest resolution possible. The content is being encoded into the Live Smooth Streaming formats by Origin Digital using Inlet Spinnaker encoders.”

This new partnership is a smart move by the UFC who are looking to take advantage of the explosion in the popularity of mixed martial arts over the last couple of years.

Saturday’s UFC 102 event. UFC 102, which is headlined by the heavyweight bout between Randy Couture and Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira and the light heavyweight clash between Keith Jardine and Thiago Silva, airs live from the Rose Garden Arena in Portland, Oregon beginning at 10pm ET / 7pm PT.

This article demonstrates how to create your own social media application in just a few steps, providing you with a solid foundation to build your own experience.

It’s important to note that Adobe Flash Media Server allows capturing directly from your webcam while you’re online. Instead of focusing on this feature, however, this article describes an easy-to-use upload/transcode/playback workflow.

Full article here

Novell

The new Moonlight 2.0 beta adds critical new security and performance features to the release as it tracks Microsoft’s ongoing development of Silverlight for Windows version 2 and 3. Moonlight 1.0 officially debuted in February, while the first Moonlight 2 preview went public in May.

Miguel De Icaza, Novell Moonlight’s project leader told InternetNews.com this week “We’re pleased that we’ve got this release only nine months after Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 went public, so we’re not lagging that far behind” De Icaza went on to say that they were  “feature-complete” and as such had passed all the graphical and audio components tests that Microsoft had given them.

Moonlight 2.0 implements APIs from Silverlight 3.0 that allow media content to run outside the browser, save content written in Silverlight, provide expanded support for Silverlight’s DeepZoom, and allow you to write codecs in managed code. Moonlight 2.0 also adjusts to the quality of a users’ connection to reduce breakages and delays.

The open-source player implements the Mono Project’s runtime, for programming in Java, C#, Ruby, Python, IronRuby and IronPython. You can also use Silverlight and Moonlight with Mono project’s OGG, Vorbis and Dirac codecs. ®