Inlet Talks Live Ad Insertion, Second-Gen Adaptive Streaming
While I can't speak to the financial results, 进口技术 在公关方面度过了美好的一年吗, seemingly becoming the manufacturer of the most high-profile hardware encoder for Microsoft's Smooth Streaming (think Olympics), one of two hardware providers listed as tested (and presumably functional) for Apple's HTTP Live streaming (think Akamai) and for Flash (think Major League Baseball). 像这样的排骨, maybe some of the diplomats in DC or in the UN should take lessons from senior execs at Inlet.
说到高管, 我采访了马特·史密斯, Inlet's Senior Director of Systems Architecture, before he left for NAB to learn about the products and technologies that Inlet planned to announce and demonstrate at the show. We recorded our conversation in ooVoo for posterity, and you can see the video at the end of this article. While the video is longish (about 30 minutes), if you hover your cursor over the video playback bar, you'll see tags that let you click directly to different sections.
现场广告插入
Inlet's most significant recent product announcement related to live advertising insertion technology. 具体地说, Inlet's Spinnaker real time encoder will recognize SCTE-35 signaling in the broadcast stream, and then make a call to an advertising server to insert an ad. If the content provider doesn't use the SCTE-35 signal, they can schedule the advertising breaks or enter them manually. 通过各种合作伙伴关系, Inlet is enabling this capability on platforms serving the iPhone/iPad, Silverlight和Flash社区.
具体来说，Inlet正在处理 mDialog for video advertising insertion into the Apple mobile ecosystem, which includes advertisements delivered via adaptive streaming with geo-targeting, 分日和频率封顶. Inlet partnered with Omneon to provide automated ad insertion capabilities for IP content delivery via the Spectrum broadcast media server, and with Vertigo for advertising insertion into the Silverlight Player.
整体, 史密斯觉得这是自动的, live advertising insertion would be a "game changer" because it's the first time advertising insertion has been available for live streaming events. 以前, 对于电视事件, 大多数百家乐软件app最新版下载都加入了SLATE, or showed the announcers sitting around chatting. 现在, live event producers can further monetize their streams with pre-, 中期, 以及片尾广告.
Inlet Spinnaker can now stream live ads to all these devices
第二代自适应流
The second major announcement relates to what Inlet is calling 第二代自适应流. 根据公司的分类, producing adaptive streams for Smooth Streaming and HTTP Live streaming was generation one. New in the second generation is adaptive streaming of H.264用于Silverlight和iPad, and future support for Adobe's new HTTP-based Dynamic Streaming when it's released later in the year.
According to Smith, though Microsoft adopted H.264 in 2008, virtually all live Silverlight broadcasts to date have used the VC-1 codec, and he felt there will be a significant exodus to H.现在Spinnaker支持它了. Since the world was clearly migrating towards mass H.264年采用, I wondered if there would be any cross-platform synergy, where a single stream could support both Silverlight and the iPad. Smith said no; all the technologies used slightly different formats, 防止重复使用, 特别是在现场场景中.
Regarding Adobe's HTTP-based Dynamic Streaming, Smith felt that it would work better than Adobe's current RTMP scheme in two use cases: extremely large events that could leverage the web's HTTP caching infrastructure, 以及更小的高清网络直播. He also commented that at least from Spinnaker's perspective, switching over from RTMP-based adaptive streaming to HTTP-based adaptive streaming would be as simple as choosing a different template in the encoder.
扩展移动覆盖
The other major announcement related to encoding support for the iPad as well as Droid and Blackberry phones. This stems from customer requests to reach platforms other than the iPhone, which Smith called the quest for "ubiquitous mobile.“在这里, Smith felt that a single stream might be able to serve multiple devices, but noted that Inlet's business was creating the streams, and that their customers would have to parse through the different file formats to determine if and when a single stream might be a match for different devices.
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