Streaming Media West 2003 Wrap-Up
Aculearn announced
AcuStudio Version 2.0, it's easy to use presentation authoring software for Windows."Rather than be a timeline based authoring tool, theirs is user-based. Their goal is to make it personalized, integrated, and effortless. As an author, you install the AcuLearn
tool on your PC, where it integrates deeply with Microsoft's Powerpoint XP. Now from Powerpoint, you select "record". Slide notes appear above the screen to provide a miniature teleprompter, with your own video feed (from a camera or pre-recorded file) appearing beside it. After allowing you to edit your material by deleting, reordering or re-recording individual slide segments, AcuStudio will automatically publish your presentation to your AcuManage server, which works with Microsoft's IIS and Windows Media Server to manage and deliver content to your users.
In a departure from the traditional model for authoring synchronized media presentations, Serious Magic was making magic with its Visual Communicator 3.0, a personal production studio-in-a-box. VC helps you prepare and create serious-looking video productions, complete with fly-in graphics and animated backgrounds. Serious Magic's Brett Weshner talks about the features that make VC unique: "The integrated teleprompter helps you sound intelligent. The ability to associate graphical materials and animation events with words in the script helps you get organized. The chroma-keyer with its laid-in backgrounds helps you look professional." VC lets you create video multimedia that looks like it came from a full production studio - by yourself. The target market is broad. "Our customers range from the third grade to the boardroom, the personal to the corporate," Weshner notes. Making high-quality presentations easy for anyone to produce is not just a product for Serious Magic, it's a philosophy. "We strongly believe that personal publishing democratizes the means of communication."
If you need a great camera to use with that copy of Visual Communicator you just ranout to buy, take a look at JVC's new Streamcorder – the GY-DV300U MiniDV three-CCD camcorder with its KA-DV350 MPEG4 streaming add-on. The Streamcorder does all the things you'd 
expect a prosumer MiniDV camera to do - and then some. Give it an Internet connection and it'll stream from 32kbps to 512kbps MPEG4 video right to your desktop. Or attach a hard drive and encode directly to DV format that your non-linear editing system can read – no conversion necessary. Plug in the WiFi adapter, and stream MPEG4 wirelessly directly to your PC for archiving or rebroadcast. At its exhibition booth, JVC also featured the new DMNC-40 bi-directional video teleconferencing appliance. Audio/video goes in, MPEG4 (64kbps-2Mbps) comes out, in unicast or multicast, with minimal latency – low enough to support high quality two-way IP video conferencing.
At the Entriq booth, employees were showcasing the services of their Media Authorization Network, which enables content and broadband service providers to protect, track, sell and syndicate online media in an efficient and secure manner. Their products which support syndication, subscription, pay per view, prepaid minutes and geographical control are being used on an outsourced service as clients view Entriq as a trusted third party. Also in the news, Entriq recently announced their support of the RealNetworks DRM format further enhancing Entriq’s PayMedia solutions.
In the Jibe booth at Streaming Media West, visitors were being shown demonstrations of full screen television quality video coming across the Internet using EdgeBurst technology. Available from Jibe as a managed service or as a technology license, EdgeBurst allows the enterprise to use its bandwidth more efficiently for distribution of any large file by "bursting" data through existing network connections. "Jibe's EdgeBurst solution is a hi-performance Media Delivery Service designed specifically for companies seeking to deliver large video, audio, and game files to Internet users on-demand. Any company with media content and a web site can leverage EdgeBurst software to accelerate downloads (up to 30X) and reduce bandwidth costs"" said Doug Schmitzer, Senior Sales representative with Jibe. Sawyer Media Systems, another Streaming Media West exhibitor, announced that it is reselling EdgeBurst services for enterprise applications as part of Sawyer Media's Enterprise Media Producer software suite.