January 12th, 2009

Brightcove adds some new leadership talent

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:22 am

Categories: Brightcove, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media

Tags: Talent, Leadership, Brightcove, Blogging, Media Players, Corporate Communications, Internet, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Marketing

This morning Brightcove made an announcement that they’re adding a few new faces. A couple of those faces will be familiar to anyone who has been involved in the RIA world for the past couple of years. Jeff Whatcott, who was vice president of marketing at Adobe, is joining as senior vice president of marketing for Brightcove. The biggest news in my mind was that David Mendels, who was senior vice president at Adobe, is joining the board of directors. I was devastated when David left Adobe because he was a great outward presence on blogs, email, and every other form of communication. As an SVP it was always impressive to see him leave a comment on someone’s blog and I can remember thinking how cool it was when he would leave a comment on my blog when I was still a community member.

Brightcove has a ton of old Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe people, so it isn’t surprising that they would draw from that pool again, and both David and Jeff were based in the Newton office. There may be some more old Adobe faces popping up at Brightcove down the road. In part because they seem to be doing so well. As Jeremy’s letter said, they released Brightcove 3 which included a chance in direction away from individuals uploading content to more polished and branded work. It seems to have been received very well.

They’ve also don a ton of work on the developer side to make it easy to use and integrate the Brightcove platform. They’ve got an XML-based BEML langauge which lets you create and customize Flash-based video players. They’ve got a Media API which lets you use REST-based web services to get actual content and metadata out of your Brightcove account. They’ve also got a number of custom components and hooks for you to build your own, so that you can add basically anything you want to your video player like stock quotes, news tickers, or anything that might enhance the experience around your content.

Brightcove continues to do a good job. As I think we’ve seen with Hulu, content is king. Brightcove has a ton of content and they’re making that accessible in a number of different ways and letting people get in and customize it to make the experience their own. The addition of Jeff and David is yet another step in the right direction.

December 1st, 2008

The widget conundrum

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 7:47 am

Categories: Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media, Rich Widgets, yourminis

Tags: Advertisement, Microsoft Silverlight, Mobile, Rich Internet Application, AdAge, Widgets, Desktops, Hardware, Ryan Stewart

There’s a pretty good article in Advertising Age about the benefits of widgets and the fact that not a lot of people are using it. AdAge says that “entire segment” will amount to around $100 million. That sounds like a chunk of money, and especially one for an industry that I consider a subset of rich Internet applications, but as the holy grail of advertising, it’s not much money. And AdAge talks to people that bring up a number of issues around widgets including non-standardization, cost, and scale. All decent reasons, but I think we’re just now getting to the point where the technologies are viable for widgets on a wide scale.

I consider widgets a subset of rich Internet applications mostly because of the technology behind them. Almost all widgets tend to be pretty interactive which makes platforms like Flash and Silverlight ideal for deployment. The fact that the embed model works so well with those technologies makes it easy to port them. Adobe AIR provides desktop functionality that lets you persist and create notifications. Then think about Flash and Silverlight’s move into the mobile world and how easily it will be to repurpose widgets across devices.

That last part is key. There is a fairly sophisticated ecosystem building up around monetization of widgets. yourminis was one of the first companies to the space and have focused on customization and working with partners. Since being acquired by AOL they’ve been busy adding customers and partners. The other aspect is being able to analyze this content and provide analytics. That’s where repurposing the widgets becomes more interesting. You could automatically track your widget across devices, social networks, and desktops with the same tracking back end.

There are also more complicated engaging widget platforms emerging. Sprout Builder is a great example of this. Something a bit more complex than a traditional widget, they provide a framework that can be customized with interactive content and then placed anywhere widgets can be. They provide the same kind of analytical tools so you can track where your widgets are going and even limit them by domain.

Widgets are a great way to engage users and the most powerful thing about the is that users can consume them in ways they control - desktop, web, Facebook, mobile, etc. So their value as an advertising engine is significant and with the ways the infrastructure is moving, it’s going to be easier and easier to create and deploy widgets.

November 13th, 2008

Google's video chat plugin - a big deal for RIA developers

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:36 am

Categories: Google, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media

Tags: Video Chat, Developer, Google Inc., Rich Internet Application, Video, Plug-in, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

A couple of days ago Google released a video chat plugin for Gmail. With Google, it’s always a little hard to figure out where all of the pieces fit - that’s why there are entire blogs dedicated to the company - but in this case, I think this seemingly innocuous Gmail feature hints at something bigger.

As I mentioned on RIA Weekly, I think there are a couple of core components to RIAs. One is a much improved graphical user interface and layout mechanism. This is part of the appeal behind technologies like Flex and XAML - they’ve got a robust set of components and it’s very easy to get pixel perfect layout. They also support vector graphics, another benefit of that increased rendering capability. The other is video and multimedia. Canvas kind of enables the first case on the HTML side, something Google could get behind. But video is tougher. Now Google has that piece. And as Dion notes, it’s not like they don’t have a way to deploy this in a wider, developer-friendly way.

The technology behind it seems a little ambiguous. They’re supposedly using some technology from Vidyo and they rely on the Flash Player for something whether that’s some behind-the-scenes communication or webcam support, I have no idea. But I’ve also heard rumblings that parts of this could be contributed back to the open source community. That would make it an interesting play for the HTML5 video tag.

So this is a big deal and it’s something to keep an eye on. Google has never been associated with the “rich” in rich Internet application, but that could start to change.

October 24th, 2008

New York Times rolling out HD video content with Brightcove

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 10:21 am

Categories: Advertising, Brightcove, Rich Media

Tags: New York Times Co., Brightcove, Video, Andy Plesser, Andy, Corporate Communications, Portals, Branding, Marketing, Internet

Andy Plesser has the scoop that the New York Times has launched a new HD video portal using Brightcove’s service, something I’ve covered recently. With news that the New York Times is in trouble, this couldn’t come at a better time. Online video continues to explode in popularity and it’s becoming arguably the best way to reach new audiences and keep those audiences engaged. The New York Times doesn’t have a brand problem or even a content problem, but newspapers just haven’t been adapting well to the web. Video is one way to counter that.

The New York Times is using the new platform which allows for dynamic streaming so that users get the best quality video stream that their bandwidth allows. The portal looks like it has a lot of great content across all of the New York Times’ categories. They look like they’re using preroll ads. With the impressive brand of the New York Times, advertisers could be more than happy to jump in and advertise on the site, especially with the economic downturn looming. This is a good move for the Times and another indication of rich media becoming more important in every facet of content creation.

October 14th, 2008

Brightcove overhauls UI with Brightcove 3

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 6:34 am

Categories: Brightcove, Online Video, Rich Media

Tags: Brightcove, Video, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

Today Brightcove is rolling out a new application as part of their web platform for content creators (Update: here’s a post by one of the Flex developers who worked on it). The new user interface and features are some of the coolest things that I’ve seen in the ever popular rich media space. There are a few highlights of the new platform but the biggest takeaway for me was that Brightcove really wants to put people in control of how their content is displayed. To that end one of the things they’ve done is overhauled how people can create new video players. Using a XUL-like language anyone can create a template for video players that includes things like a horizontal list of related videos, meta data, and various other aspects of the video player experience. That can be saved as a template and then used across an entire network of sites. What’s nice is that you can then build on top of that template to customize the experience even more. In the demo I saw they used a nature show to demonstrate how you could add a playlist of rainforest videos and skin the original template with rainforest assets. You could then take that same template and customize it for an ocean themed show. They really nailed the branding aspect of video while allowing reuse of assets and a ton of control with the XUL-based interface language.

A couple of the other highlights include new APIs and dynamic streaming. The new APIs are expose in both Flash and JavaScript so that regardless of the technology you’re using, you can still get in and manipulate or access various parts of the video. Using the APIs you can pull out metadata, make changes to the playlist, or even alter how the video plays. It’s going to mean that developers and site creators can easily customize what and how they want things to appear on their sites. Dynamic streaming lets content creators encode multiple versions of a video at different bitrates so that the user gets the highest quality version available. Brightcove detects the bandwidth and then based on settings that the content creator establishes, the user gets the best possible quality video stream.

All in all Brightcove 3 is a big leap forward in giving the people who create video a ton of control over how that video behaves. It’s a good step for the rich media world and a great example of where the industry needs to go.

October 9th, 2008

RIA podcast goodness

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 7:28 am

Categories: Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media

Tags: Rich Internet Application, Podcasts, Internet, Ryan Stewart

There are a couple of news bits on the podcast front that should make anyone interested in RIAs happy. One, Coté and I are getting back in the routine of doing RIA Weekly. We’re celebrating by rolling out a brand new RIAWeekly.com domain. Now that summer is over and we’ve got things like PDC and MAX coming up, there should be a lot to talk about.

David Tucker over at InsideRIA is also doing a podcast titled the Weekly RIA RoundUp. It’s basically a rundown of the biggest RIA-related news so it’s a great way to catch up on what you may have missed during the week.

September 9th, 2008

H.264 support coming for Silverlight

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 10:05 am

Categories: Microsoft, Rich Media, Silverlight

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, H.264, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

At the IAB conference in Europe, Microsoft announced that they would be supporting both the H.264 video codec and the AAC audio codec in a future version of Silverlight. Up until now, Microsoft has focused on VC-1 which powers all of Windows media. One of the differentiators of Flash was that the latest release of Flash Player 9 supported H.264 and AAC which are becoming something of a standard in the video industry. Apple heavily relies on H.264 and AAC to power it’s rich media offerings.

This is a pretty big deal as it makes Silverlight a possibility for companies that don’t want to use Windows Media for whatever reason. And when you combine this with last month’s news that Microsoft invested in Move Networks, and it’s clear Microsoft is very interested in online video. There’s no word on when this version of Silverlight would be available. I suppose there’s a chance that it could be released when Silverlight 2 goes out (which should be sometime soon) but more likely this is a Silverlight 3 feature. Update: Josh Catone got confirmation of this.

September 5th, 2008

What went wrong with Joost's desktop client?

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 12:07 pm

Categories: Joost, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media

Tags: Ryan Stewart

The news broke today that Joost, the company which in a lot of ways was on the forefront of rich media, is canning its signature desktop client in favor of a purely web based portal. As a big proponent of desktop applications in general, and especially these hybrid applications which provide desktop functionality, I’m disappointed. And I’ve got a few thoughts on why so that others in the space don’t make the same mistake.

Content - Aside from a couple of niche shows, Joost just didn’t have the content draw that a site like Hulu has. Content is king and new content seems to be in demand. Joost couldn’t keep up.

Use of the Desktop - I’m not really sure why Joost used the desktop. It didn’t provide any desktop-like features. You couldn’t save things to your hard drive to watch them offline. Essentially Joost was just a desktop application that let you go full screen. When Joost was released, the web didn’t have that, but Silverlight and Flash Player advanced enough where it became trivial to do in the browser.

Lack of Link to the Web - Joost had a “Share” button, but it only used IM and Email. People want to share and embed things on their MySpace/Facebook pages. This is something I think a lot of rich media desktop apps (including Adobe Media Player) don’t get. If you want to do a desktop client you have to provide the benefits of the desktop in the context of the web. Let people take content from the desktop player and embed/share it. Ideally, even provide a way to access a bulk of the content from a web portal.

In the end I think a hybrid approach is the way of the world going forward. Despite the buzz from Chrome, the desktop still has a lot of benefits as an application platform. But the web browser has to be central to every strategy. The companies that can easily blend those to worlds - and then incorporate the mobile world as well - will have a leg up on everyone else.

September 4th, 2008

Adobe and NBC to provide live streaming of NFL games

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 4:10 pm

Categories: Adobe, Flash, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., NBC, NFL, Video, Live Streaming, Video Quality, Corporate Communications, Games, Marketing, Personal Technology

Adobe just announced that the NFL is going to use Flash to deliver live, online streaming video for NBC Sunday and Thursday night football games. You can go watch the games on NBCSports.com right now. It looks like they used Flex to build the player and I assume they’re using H.264 as the codec.

The NFL is a really, really tough nut to crack. As the biggest sports league in America in terms of revenue and viewership, they can basically do anything they want. And their incentive to take risks is very low.

The video quality is pretty good and I love the fact that you can switch between cameras. They’ve got 5 live streams going at the same time and it’s going to be a great way to check out replays. And because it’s live, they’re still able to include advertising. The killer is a lack of full screen. The Olympics Silverlight app did this as well and I can’t figure it out. That should be such a key, easy feature. Hopefully this isn’t the start of a trend.

I think this is going to be a great example of Flash, a great showcase for RIAs, and hopefully a good point of comparison between the Olympic Silverlight player.

August 26th, 2008

How the world watched the Olympics online

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 4:33 pm

Categories: Adobe, Flash, Microsoft, Online Video, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media, Silverlight

Tags: China, Olympic Games, British Broadcasting Corp., Video, Flash, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

Much has been made of NBC’s Olympic numbers, which had the rights for online video in the US, and what that means for Silverlight. I thought the app was solid, the video quality was good, and all in all it was a win for Microsoft and RIAs. In that vein, I’m pretty impressed with how Adobe did across the rest of the world. The BBC in the UK and CCTV in China were both big Flash users. There were a number of other countries using Flash as well (and a couple using Silverlight). I think the numbers show that there’s worldwide interest in rich media and strong adoption of Flash.

In fact, the majority of online video for the Olympics was delivered in Flash. There’s a great blog post up by John O’Donovan, the Chief Technical Architect at the BBC about their Olympic numbers. For Beijing they streamed nearly 40 million videos with up to 5.5 million Olympic videos watched each day at an average of around 3 million. In total there were 6.5 million hours of video delivered using Flash by the BBC. What those numbers don’t include are streams from the BBC iPlayer or the mobile platforms. It’s all Flash in the browser. Compare that to 72 million videos in the states, and it shows that in a country much smaller than the US, online the Olympics was a hit.

More importantly, the numbers out of China are fantastic. In the first 10 days CCTV’s website streamed Olympic coverage to 100 million people according to the New York Times (registration required). CCTV used an innovative system which combined Flash Media Server with their own P2P technology which made it easy for anyone in China to watch the Olympics regardless of bandwidth. So in China we’ll have 2,900 hours of Olympic content backed up and ready to watch with Flash Video.

What’s also interesting to see is how the BBC got more comfortable over the course of the Olympics with their video content. By the end of the Olympics they were actually putting the live video stream on the front page of the BBC News homepage as the lead story. That’s pretty impressive and I think it’s a very good sign that rich media is creeping even more deeply into a role as a primary way to consume content.