ipTV EVANGELIST: Industry Announcements : Covering Internet Television Technology, Trends and the User

A Story From A Child

A project that comes from the creative mind of Adrian Smith, writer, producer and editor and former Yahoo! colleague

A Story From A Child is a direct interaction between children, parents, teachers and artists. Each story is based on a child's own experience, story or pastime. Our creative team then works with parents and teachers to draw that story out from the child - illustrate it, set it to music, add narration and then bring it to life through simple animation.

The benefit for a child to see something from their imagination fully realized is immeasurable in terms of self-esteem and boosting their creative output.

The funding we are seeking is to create the illustrations, music and narration for the first set of videos and to build out the website that will host them. Our budget is very modest as we hope to make a small return and become self-funding a short while after we launch.

The materials for our storytelling will stay constant. We work with pen and ink, musical instruments, digital coloring, editing and animation and the human voice. The variable will be the nature of the story that is culled and evoked from the child's imagination.

A Story From A Child is a unique storytelling project that will live for as long as there is a community to sustain it. It is truly collaborative and brings together children, parents, teachers, illustrators, musicians and filmmakers in an ongoing storytelling cycle.

Please visit our fundraising site on Kickstarter to see how you can help make this project happen and watch a video, which includes a classic story example. Be sure to check out the many rewards we offer for the different pledge levels.

Posted by iptve at 9:47 AM | Permalink

Sharedband Leverages Highwinds System Suite

WINTER PARK, Fla. - March 2, 2011 - Highwinds^®, a leader in content delivery, network and IP services, today announced that Sharedband Technologies is utilizing a tailored set of services available through Highwinds System Suite^™. The System Suite brings together network infrastructure and content delivery services under one agreement. It offers customers a great deal of flexibility, scalability and bundling opportunities from a single-source provider. Sharedband is using Highwinds' transit, transport, peering and colocation services in 11 U.S. and European cities.

Sharedband's technology is designed to radically improve the performance and resilience of Internet connections by aggregating multiple, low-cost broadband connections into a single high-performance connection. Sharedband has its roots in the United Kingdom and is undergoing U.S. expansion by forming key partnerships and casting a generous technological net over the country. Highwinds is a vital part of the expansion, and deployments are currently underway.

Highwinds System Suite offers value to customers by enabling them to mix and match physical network locations, services, carriers and formats to build a customized network under one commit level with aggregate volume pricing across all services. This may include any combination of CDN, transit, transport, peering, colocation and content storage services. Sharedband is using Highwinds' transit, transport and colocation services, with between five and eight servers in each of 11 data centers. Services are combined under a single commit level and utilize one Multi-Use Port in each location, a single cross-connect that simplifies each installation and eliminates the need for expensive switches.

Highwinds' RollingThunder^® network consists of a ringed, redundant architecture made up of multiple 10 Gbps connections between its more than 70 points of presence worldwide. The network boasts more than 1,600 peering sessions and has visibility into 12,000 networks.

For more information, visit www.highwinds.com.

Posted by iptve at 11:12 AM | Permalink

Starmax HD, Spain's New HDTV Platform, Launches With GlobeCast

PARIS -- March 1, 2011 -- Starmax HD, Spain's new HD service, has chosen GlobeCast to provide aggregation, encryption, and delivery of the full bouquet of channels broadcast to millions of households across the country. Hailed as a significant innovation in pay TV, Starmax HD has been developed from the ground up to provide the best HDTV platform to Spanish viewers in an accessible, affordable package without requiring a contract or minimum term.

GlobeCast's end-to-end service for Starmax HD includes fiber contribution from several countries; reception of SD and HD channels at the company's Sainte Assise Teleport in France; signal compression in MPEG-4 with multiplexing, uplink, and satellite capacity; and encryption for Conax.

In addition to GlobeCast's content management and transmission services, the Starmax platform uses set-top boxes from Ferguson, and viewer access cards from Conax. Starmax viewers will have the ability to record programs and play content files from external hard drives, as well as Internet access to streaming content through the set-top box.

Posted by iptve at 10:24 AM | Permalink

Haivision Enhances Makito™ and Barracuda™ Lowest Latency H.264 Encoders With Real-Time Metadata Capabilities

MONTREAL and CHICAGO -- March 1, 2011 -- Haivision, leading provider of the most advanced video networking, digital signage, and IP video distribution solutions, today announced significant enhancements to the Makito™ HD H.264 and Barracuda™ SD H.264 low-latency compact encoding appliances. The new real-time metadata capabilities are in response to advanced requirements from military and medical integrators that need to incorporate mission-critical data transmission within the video transport pipeline.

Building on its legacy of providing the first commercial H.264 encoder to support KLV metadata encapsulation, Haivision has expanded KLV support on the Makito and Barracuda encoder families to include metadata from Ethernet (UDP/IP) and the SDI vertical ancillary data space (VANC). The ability to receive KLV metadata from UDP/IP sources enables system integrators to migrate their complete metadata architecture from serial to IP and, in turn, to realize metadata convergence and data distribution flexibility. Support of KLV metadata encapsulation from the VANC allows for direct integration of the Makito and Barracuda H.264 encoders with sensor turrets, as used in airborne vehicles, and ensures the frame accuracy of that metadata encapsulation. In fact, Haivision's VANC support was developed based on significant field testing with industry-leading sensor turrets.

Haivision has also significantly expanded its support for Cursor on Target (CoT) metadata. CoT metadata was developed for airborne target acquisition and tracking, completely independently of the KLV standards developed for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) video. Haivision encoders bridge this divide by converting CoT to KLV in real time and then multiplexing the KLV metadata into MISP-compliant video streams. The single feature eliminates the need for a stand-alone mission computer to perform the same essential function, which saves significant size, weight, power, and cost. Haivision's latest firmware release supports broader CoT-to-KLV mapping libraries as used within systems by the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, and other Department of Defense (DoD) customers, allowing far greater interoperability across different platforms and the missions that each military branch supports.

With the release of Makito and Barracuda firmware 1.5, Haivision has made both KLV and CoT metadata capabilities available as a firmware option on both products.

Complete information on Haivision products, including recent case studies and application notes, is available within the download center at www.haivision.com.

Posted by iptve at 10:20 AM | Permalink

Byte-Sized Television: Create Your Own TV Series for the Internet

Television has a new home: The Internet. It's the Wild West of series production, where pioneers are making their own laws and attracting huge audiences.

From one of television's most successful writer/producers, Byte-Sized Television is the only book that shows you how to create your own Internet TV series and reach audiences in the millions. Based on the author's groundbreaking courses at one of America's top film schools, this entertaining guide takes the aspiring filmmaker step-by-step through the entire creative process of writing and producing a short-form Internet TV series.

Purchase book

Company not found

Posted by iptve at 10:44 AM | Permalink

Sorenson Media Partners with Kulabyte to Create the Squeeze Live Cloud Encoding Platform

Image representing Sorenson Media as depicted ...

BARCELONA, Spain (February 14, 2011) -- Sorenson Media today announced a new partnership with Kulabyte, an industry leader in live HD and mobile video streaming, to bring the new Squeeze Live cloud encoding platform to market. Currently in beta, the new solution, which was announced today from World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, Spain, enables high-volume live video encoding for distribution to any mobile device or computer.

Squeeze Live's architecture enables the event producer to entirely re-think traditional approaches to live broadcast. With audiences increasingly consuming media on multiple devices at multiple bitrates, adaptive bitrate streaming capability provides a high-quality, reliable, consistent stream, even for challenging bandwidth environments. Preparing multiple renditions previously required additional on-site encoding hardware, bandwidth and infrastructure. Squeeze Live eliminates this wasteful per-event overspending and logistical problem, in favor of a flexible, modular, yet comprehensive high-quality live streaming platform.

Squeeze Live provides the ability to seamlessly connect video-on-demand encoding of live streams, ensuring complete event coverage all within a single cloud platform.

Squeeze Live significantly streamlines and optimizes the previously complex, cumbersome and costly process of encoding video for online delivery for live events--including sporting events, awards ceremonies, conferences, breaking news and exposition presentations. The Squeeze Live solution first passes through a live video stream front-end encoder onsite. The encoded stream is then sent to the cloud for encoding in real time into multiple formats and bitrates, optimized for playback on TV, desktop or laptop computers, or on a broad range of mobile devices, including Blackberry, iPad and iPhone, Android and others. In the final step of this real time process, multiple renditions of each video profile are delivered to the content delivery network (CDN) of choice for streaming.

Primary benefits for Squeeze Live users include:

Significantly reduced capital and operating expenditures, including reductions in required equipment, dedicated workforce and other infrastructure.
Greatly reduced bandwidth requirements and power consumption--all of the real-time encoding takes place in the cloud, reducing client bandwidth and server requirements and eliminating the need for HVAC equipment/support.
Flexible deployment options that eliminate over-purchasing hardware, bandwidth and IT resources; Squeeze Live offers efficient, flexible deployment--all hardware included.
Multiple renditions; Multiple bitrate files in the most popular formats, including H.264 and Flash.
A highly intuitive single dashboard: Once users indicate how many original streams need to be encoded and the number of formats needed per output, Squeeze Live automatically determines server requirements and fully automates provisioning in the cloud.

Pricing and Availability

Squeeze Live is currently in beta and available immediately. For more information about Squeeze Live, visit sorensonmedia.com/squeeze-live For custom pricing options, contact a member of the Sorenson Media sales team at sales (AT) sorensonmedia.com.

Company not found

Posted by iptve at 9:08 AM | Permalink

NewTek Releases TriCaster™ Virtual Set Editor

LONDON - BROADCAST VIDEO EXPO - February 15, 2011 - NewTek, a worldwide leader in video and 3D animation products, releases NewTek TriCaster™ Virtual Set Editor (VSE), which allows TriCaster TCXD850 and TriCaster TCXD300 users to customize TriCaster high definition (HD) virtual sets to fit their production needs. TriCaster Virtual Set Editor will be showcased on the main stage of NewTek booth E20 at the Broadcast Video Expo 2011, February 15-17, in London.

With TriCaster Virtual Set Editor, producers get exclusive TriCaster VSE Sets that produce real-time reflections and specular highlights, and have a wide variety of elements that can be edited.

TriCaster VSE users also have the option to create their own virtual sets by populating Layer Sets with their artwork, or composing layers in Adobe® Photoshop®, and then importing the layers into TriCaster VSE, which instantly transforms the PSD file into a Layer Set for use in VSE.

Once a TriCaster virtual set has been customized with Virtual Set Editor, users can easily export it for immediate use in their TriCaster live production.

Virtual Set Editor includes three TriCaster VSE-compatible virtual set content files, three Layer Sets and three PSD examples. For a limited time, VSE will ship with three bonus sets, valued at over $1000, providing early buyers with a total of six VSE-compatible virtual set content files. Additional content may be sold separately.

NewTek TriCaster Virtual Set Editor provides the ability to:
• Change the color and tone of set elements
• Apply custom logos and artwork to sets
• Replace background images with video or images of choice
• Show or hide select set furniture and fixtures
• Add custom backgrounds and frames to double-box effects
• Set start and end framing position of virtual zoom
• Adjust placement (position, scale and rotation) of live video inputs
• Add your own artwork to Layer Sets to create custom virtual sets
• Import layered Adobe Photoshop files to create original HD virtual sets from 2D images

Company not found

Posted by iptve at 9:07 AM | Permalink

THE NEW INCUBATORS, an ibreakfast Event


There is a new kind of Incubator rising up in the entrepreneurial community. Lower cost, more activist and highly connected to the business world.

Is this good or bad and how is it affecting the world of entrepreneurship and investing? Most of all - how can you tap into this growing movement?

Wednesday, Feb. 23,  7:30am - 10:00am · 2 Park Ave. Register early and you can make an elevator pitch.
Panelists:
David Tisch, TechStars
Brian Cohen, NY Angels
Gabe Zichermann, Founder Institute

Moderator:
Alan Brody, iBreakfast

Sponsored by Herrick, Feinstein

www.breakfast.com
http://www.eventbrite.com/event/1253387917

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Posted by iptve at 8:59 AM | Permalink

EchoStar Corporation to Acquire Hughes Communications, Inc.

Englewood, Colorado and Germantown, Maryland, February 14, 2011 - EchoStar Corporation (NASDAQ: SATS) and Hughes Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: HUGH) announced today an agreement pursuant to which EchoStar will acquire all of the outstanding equity of Hughes and its subsidiaries including its main operating subsidiary, Hughes Network Systems, LLC in a transaction valued at approximately $2 billion, including Hughes debt expected to be refinanced in connection with the transaction. EchoStar Corporation is recognized as a leader in the telecommunications industry for its innovation in satellite solutions and technology, and its broadcasting expertise. Hughes is the global leader in broadband satellite technologies and services, and a leading provider of managed network services. The transaction will greatly enhance EchoStar's capabilities for broadband transport of video and data.

Under the terms of the transaction, which has been approved by the Boards of Directors of both companies, Hughes' shareholders will receive $60.70 per share without interest, which represents a premium of 31% over Hughes' unaffected closing share price of $46.43 on January 19, 2011. The transaction is expected to close later this year, subject to certain closing conditions including receipt of federal regulatory approvals. Investment funds affiliated with Apollo Management IV, L.P., who own a majority of Hughes' outstanding stock, have approved the transaction by entering into a written shareholder consent.

Pradman Kaul, President and Chief Executive Officer of Hughes, stated, "We are very pleased to announce this transaction as it brings together the two premier providers of satellite communications services and delivers substantial value to our shareholders. By combining Hughes' operational strength and proven record of customer satisfaction with EchoStar's expertise in cutting edge satellite video technology, customers will benefit significantly from our shared institutional excellence."

"There is a unique and compelling fit between Hughes and EchoStar," said Michael Dugan, President and Chief Executive Officer of EchoStar. "With a rich engineering culture, an extensive fleet of owned and leased satellites, and experienced personnel in communications centers around the world, the combination of EchoStar and Hughes will create a powerful leader in video and data transport."

Posted by iptve at 8:47 AM | Permalink

Woomi Goes Live on Samsung Smart TVs Across the UK

London, February 3, 2011 - Miniweb, the leading cloud-based video distribution platform for connected TVs, announced today that woomi (http://www.miniweb.tv), the new connected TV destination, is now live across the UK on all Samsung smart TVs that feature the Internet@TV portal.

The UK launch marks the beginning of woomi's European rollout. By mid 2011, Miniweb predicts woomi to be on more than half of the world's connected TVs.

"We encourage publishers and device manufacturers to embrace connected TV. This is the future of TV and that is why we have created a unique marketplace for them. We are not streaming video or acquiring rights, but are acting as an agent or retailer. We enable our content partners to keep their brand identity and business model, and promote and monetize their content on as many TVs as possible," explains Jerome de Vitry, CEO, Miniweb.

By registering their content with woomi, publishers get immediate access to an exponentially expanding base of consumers with woomi-enabled TV devices. Woomi gives them total control and the ability to personalize the user experience with their brand and business models. It also offers a complete monetization solution through either single-click secure end-user payments or advertising.

Woomi provides an effective solution for TV device manufacturers and operators looking to expand video content to hundreds of publishers on connected TVs, set top boxes, Blu-ray players and gaming consoles. The system is enhanced with user-friendly functions such as search, discovery, recommendations, personalization and single click payment.