Saving Streaming

Next-Generation Entertainment
But the enterprise isn’t necessarily where recording streaming will take off. Both Sheffield and Vic Treckeme, founder of Twinklesoft, see saving streaming having the most impact in the entertainment market.

Twinklesoft’s MediaRecorder, along with a wide spectrum of free and paid streaming recorders (see sidebar), allows for the simple recording of streamed audio and video. "It’s as easy as specifying the source Web address, a file for saving the broadcast to, and timer or clock-based recording," says Treckeme. His curiousity about the possibility of saving Internet radio streams "led to the development of the Twinklesoft MediaRecorder product," says Treckeme. MediaRecorder records at the same level of quality as the broadcast, but "while Internet broadcasts parallel traditional ones in many ways, quality is one area where they differ," says Treckeme.

That said, the quality gap is closing, especially for audio (one listen at Orban’s booth at Streaming Media East certainly opened my ears to what can be done with relatively low-bandwidth audio), which is what will put it at the forefront of the "fair use" debate. Treckeme supports the idea that recordings should be handled the same as for traditional radio and TV broadcasting. "There, recording for personal use is legal, and we’ve had the means to do this for years—audio and video cassettes, CD and DVD recorders," says Treckeme. "Why should Internet broadcasts be any different?" Of course, once someone tries to capture a broadcast and then sell copies for profit, they’ve used the content illegally.

According to Treckeme, "Products such as MediaRecorder enable time-shifting" of streamed content. Some streaming providers already offer the ability to rewind, pause, and fast forward without the need for saving content to a hard drive. But eventually, as streaming grows in bandwidth usage and DVRs find their way into more and more home theaters, it may become easier and cheaper to simply save content locally on the fly rather than starting, stopping, and adjusting the stream. This could especially be true for events like NBA games and NASCAR races that benefit from multi-camera Webcasts.

"Movie studio and production houses will find [saving streaming] a useful tool," says ZyGoDigital’s Sheffield. "They can actually share things that they’re working on in real time." But even more than that, directors and producers will one day soon be able to do rough cuts of dailies (all of the footage shot during one day of a shoot) on their PDAs. The dailies will be streamed to the PDA, clips can then be saved and roughly edited, and finally the EDL (Edit Decision List) will be uploaded back on to the server, changing the original content’s timecode to reflect the cuts that were made. "The important thing is to keep track of the timecode markers so you can build a really good EDL," says Sheffield. "You can also come up with a way to describe fades, dissolves, and things like that." In fact, non-linear editing software like Final Cut Pro has already started to do that with XML. Sheffield strongly believes that this application of saving streaming could revolutionize film production, but "it’s not there yet."