February 6th, 2009
iStreamPlanet helps bring Grammy watchers more behind-the-scenes entertainment
While watching awards shows I’ve always felt sorry for the winners who never make it to prime time. You know the ones; their glory is usually promoted in a quick scroll across the bottom of the TV-screen or some obviously disinterested celebrity unemotionally reading them from a list.
The poor nominees rarely even get mentioned. More important, fans of these artists or followers of these less popular categories never get the full award show payoff.
Why am I babbling about this? Two reasons:
- The Recording Academy has opted to live stream what it’s calling a Grammy Pre-Telecast Ceremony on Sunday, Feb. 8, from 1-3:45 p.m. PT
- All too many times the “metal” category of the Grammys has been thrown by the prime time wayside to make room for pop music. That’s always bugged me — even though I’ve never thought The Recording Academy was an expert on the metal craft anyway.
Enough about my agenda, let’s talk about the Grammys. The 51st Annual Grammy Awards Pre-Telecast Ceremony will take place on at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The ceremony is the non-televised event where a majority of Grammy categories are awarded, and it has its own guest presenters and live performances. Comedian Wayne Brady will host the ceremony.
The live stream will be delivered by iStreamPlanet in conjunction with Springboard Productions. With Springboard producing the content, iStreamPlanet will manage onsite content acquisition; onsite encoding and transcoding; building the rich media player experience that incorporated adaptive streaming from Move Networks; content integration with the Grammy Web site; and ingestion into AT&T’s Content Delivery Network for distribution.
Even though I feel disappointment in the Grammys themselves for their treatment of my favorite genre, I am becoming quite the fan and watcher of iStreamPlanet and the interesting partnerships they keep getting themselves into. This is the second high-profile event in a month that the company has been brought in to do — the first was teaming up with Microsoft for live streaming of President Barack Obama’s inauguration.
“Audiences are getting savvier and have high expectations, especially in terms of video quality. We have to deliver video streaming that is equal to the experience they have with viewing content on their TV, regardless of what type of Internet connection they have. We are leveraging AT&T’s CDN and Move Networks adaptive streaming technology to create what we feel will be the most memorable Grammy experience yet,” said Mio Babic, CEO of iStreamPlanet.
Watch the live stream of the Grammy Pre-Telecast here. Oh, and when are the Grammys on? Check your local listings for times but they will air on CBS on Sunday night.
Jennifer Leggio, aka "Mediaphyter," writes about the "social business" side of social media - including enterprise, security and reputation issues. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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