This is the first video tutorial in a new series by the Xiph.org open source community, in order to spread techie-level knowledge about digital media as well as their own work involving new media research. In their own words, it "presents the technical foundations of modern digital media via a half-hour firehose of information." Luckily, there's also an accompanying wiki that allows you to slow things down a little.
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Microsoft announces IE9 will support native playback of videos using HTML5, but it will only support H.264 and not its more open alternatives. Read more about it here.
Yesterday, Streamingmedia.com ran an article about the technology behind Chatroulette, the newest internet hype. It turns out that Chatroulette (warning: may be NSFW) is using Wowza Media Server as a fallback mechanism for Flash Player 10's peer-to-peer ability.
The most interesting part of the article describes how Andrey Ternovsky, Chatroulette's founder, was given ample support by Wowza although he didn't even have a license. It clearly characterizes our partner Wowza: innovative and willing to think along with their customers - a philosophy also shared by Rambla. The article further mentions the flexibility of the Wowza Media Server architecture, which is an excellent match for our own service-based platform and gives us the necessary room for doing custom projects and development.
Basically, it sums up two of the main reasons why Rambla chose Wowza as its streaming partner three years ago, and has never regretted it since. And, oh yeah, it's true: "Charlie" definitely rules!
Jan Ozer published some interesting tests comparing Adobe's flash player to YouTube's new HTML5-based player, with regard to the amount of CPU usage needed for video playback.
His main conclusion is that Flash is efficient on platforms where it can access hardware acceleration (e.g. Windows) and less efficient where it can't (e.g. Mac). An additional conclusion is that the CPU horsepower needed to play back HTML5 video also differs substantially depending on the browser being used.
You can read the entire publication here.
This week, the chairman of Warner Music lashed out against online music streaming services such as Spotify, LastFM and We7. Warner's CEO, Edgar Bronfman Jr, said: "Free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry and as far as Warner Music is concerned will not be licensed. The get all your music you want for free, and then maybe with a few bells and whistles we can move you to a premium price strategy, is not the kind of approach to business that we will be supporting in the future".
This is yet another episode in the troubled relationship between music companies and streaming music services and communities, which are largely ad-driven. Last year, for instance, the position of the music industry led to the demise of Fabchannel, a company that provided live-streams of concerts.
Meanwhile, some of our customers are successfully providing music streaming services, seemingly having a good relationship with the music industry:
- Aristo Music is a music company that develops new selection and distribution technologies for digital music and provides music services with high added value. Their KBC Radio is an example of how a music streaming service doesn't have to depend on ad-revenue.
- The Ancienne Belgique, our Belgian rock temple, has been live streaming concerts - of both international and local artists - for a couple of years now and is still going strong. The AB also provides an on-demand streaming platform for new and upcoming artists to showcase their talent. Their next live concert is scheduled for Wednesday February 17th and will feature The XX.
So congratulations to our customers. They are the living proof that streaming music services can also be in the interest of the music industry.
