Posts from — March 2011

Yesterday, Netflix blogged that they have modified their service to allow Canadian users to reduce streaming quality, to avoid exceeding customers’ monthly bandwidth allowance forced by Canadian internet providers.  The service will default to “Good” quality and allow users to turn up the bandwidth usage to “Better” or “Best”, which should result in better quality video.  Below are the settings as I understand them:

1. “Good” – The default setting of 625 Kbps with good picture quality and lowest data use per hour (about 0.3 GBytes/hour)
2. “Better” – Better picture quality of 1300 Kbps and medium data use per hour (about 0.7 GBytes/hour)
3. “Best” – Best picture quality of 4800 Kbps and highest date use per hour (generally about 1.0 GBytes/hour – or up to 2.3 GBytes/hour when streaming HD content)

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Whether you have multimedia content on a remote device like a file server (NAS) or your laptop, the next big question: how do I stream that content wirelessly to my TV?  There are a few ways to do so, and if you’re into consumer gadgetry in general then chances are you have a solution already.  For instance, I have a Xbox 360 and an Apple TV2.  The Xbox 360 natively supports wireless networking to a file server but is limited in its media codec support.  Plus its pretty college-bootleg to have to boot up the 360 to watch a movie.

Apple TV 2 on the other hand is very slick and simple, yet missing the essential streaming from a (gasp!) non-Apple machine.  That’s right – at this time, Home Sharing is not something you’ll find on a device other than another apple computer.  I had no intention of buying another Apple device to serve media content.  Thankfully, the kind folks at http://www.appletvhacks.net had just published an article to jailbreak the operating system on the Apple TV so you can inject additional software onto the device.  This sounds complicated, but it really isn’t.  Just follow the instructions and soon you can be playing high definition movies from your file server running XBMC (formerly Xbox Media Center).

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Since my first job as a New Media Producer in 1999, I have done boatloads of reading about online audio and video, particularly in the webcasting space, and watched companies surface and sink in the process.  I still work for a company with the leading Corporate Communications and Investor Relations webcast business around the globe, though I haven’t done a competitive analysis to really dig deep under the skin of the latest providers and search for facts…until now.  We have our own OVP just newly released, so its important to really understand the landscape and who we’re up against. This blog entry is the first of several to document my findings and experiences along the way while I write my competitive analysis, to achieve 20/20 vision over the webcasting and multimedia landscape.  For starters, we’ll narrow the scope and start with Online Video Providers (OVP), which are the hottest trend going right now in the multimedia space for self-service editing, hosting, and broadcasting content over the web.

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