2011 Editors' Picks for the Best in Streaming Video
SeaWell Networks Lumen 1000
With all the attention this year on the various flavors of adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming from Microsoft, Adobe, and Apple, scalable video coding for H.264—which Jan Ozer wondered in 2009 if it might be “the future of video delivery”—got lost in the shuffle, precisely because it didn’t have a single big-name vendor pushing it. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not a viable solution. And this year, SeaWell introduced its Lumen1000, which transcodes a file in one format to a single H.264 file that has up to 27 different bitrate and resolution versions in a single file. The Lumen 1000 uses scalability parameters to determine how many bitrates and devices will be supported, which replaces the need to create multiple bitrate files as in ABR solutions, and it also changes the GOP and chunk sizes to optimize the file for the type of network used for delivery.
—Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen
Telestream Wirecast
Telestream Wirecast is a software-only live (or live to disk) video production tool that mixes multiple inputs; adds transitions, titles, and other effects; and produces a stream that you can have delivered by CDNs such as Limelight and Akamai and live streaming service providers such as Livestream, Ustream, Justin.tv, and WebCast-TV. When configured with Wowza Media Server 2 Advanced, Wirecast can serve multiprotocol streams to the iPhone and the iPod touch; to Flash, Silverlight, and QuickTime web players; and to IPTV set-top boxes. Wirecast offers an exceptional blend of well-targeted functionality that is unique in the price range, and after you get settled into the interface, it’s relatively simple to use. If you’re serious about chucking those writing chores to make it on internet TV, or if you have a real job and just want to create some highly polished live or live-to-disk internet broadcasts, Wirecast should be on top of your purchasing list.
—Jan Ozer
WebM
Google’s decision last summer to open source VP8 in the form of WebM was the opening salvo of yet another codec war, and its move in early 2011 to drop support for H.264 in the Chrome browser (though it will still work within the Flash and Silverlight plug-ins) signaled that, as Tim Siglin wrote, “a unified HTML5 <video> tag is now a pipe dream.” And despite the fact that he found WebM’s quality to be “good enough” in comparison to H.264, Jan Ozer wrote that Google hasn’t “created any positive reason to distribute video in WebM format. They haven’t created any new revenue opportunities, opened any new markets or increased the size of the pie. They’ve just made it more expensive to get your share, all in the highly ethereal pursuit of ‘open codec technologies.’” And so WebM makes our list in much the same way that TIME magazine occasionally feels compelled to choose a dictator as its “Person of the Year.”
—Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen
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