Contentinople | February 9, 2009
While most people watched the telecast 51st Annual Grammy Awards starting at 8:00 p.m. ET on CBS last night, there was a whole three hours of non-televised content that viewers could only watch live online.
The Grammy Awards Pre-Telecast, which includes nearly 100 categories of Grammy awards that don’t make the televised awards program, was brought online with production and technical expertise from Springboard Productions, iStreamPlanet Co. , Move Networks Inc. , and AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T).
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Streaming Media | February 8, 2009
The 51st annual Grammy Awards telecast this year had 24 artists performing nearly 30 songs over three-and-a-half hours. But the “pre-tel” awards ceremony, where more than 100 other awards are given to several hundred recipients, was traditionally an obscure, invitation-only affair, held in the Los Angeles Convention Center adjacent to the Staples Center where the televised show originates from. That changed in 2008 when the Recording Academy green-lighted a beta trial of live-streaming the pre-tel ceremony. . .
The transfer rate this year is up to 1.4Mbps, using Move Networks’ Move Media Player, whose adaptive streaming technology will automatically query each viewer’s computer to determine its connection and processor speed and type, and then optimize the stream for that user. AT&T was the CDN provider.
Sounds Good
In the world of streaming, the focus tends to be on the picture, with smooth, unbuffered motion the ultimate goal. However, this webcast was part of the Grammy experience, the music industry’s most important yearly broadcast event. The audio would warrant some attention of its own.
Although Move’s media player is essentially a black-box solution, with the adaptive streaming and other parameter optimization taking place based on preset profiles, Mark East, director of managed webcasting for iStreamPlanet and the producer of the pre-tel Grammy webcast, is a fan of how Move’s player sounds out of the box. “They have a really nice mix of profiles in their default settings. In the upper ranges especially, it’s great-sounding audio,” he says. The adaptive streaming adjusts for both audio and video. “The low-end will not drop below 64kbps and will scale up to 96kbps at higher profiles,” David Rice, Move Networks’ v.p. of marketing, explains.
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ZDNet | February 6, 2009
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.
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Los Angeles Times | February 3, 2009
The emergence of Hulu and other free sources of TV online has prompted some breathless talk about consumers dumping their cable subscriptions in favor of Internet-connected TVs. That’s a nice sentiment, but cable and satellite services still have some features the streaming TV sites don’t. One is high-definition programming in abundance, although that gap is closing thanks to technologies from the likes of Move Networks and Vusion.
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InformITV | January 22, 2009
CNN served a record 1.3 million concurrent live video streams in the moments leading up to the inaugural address of American President Barack Obama. That may be partly down to using peer-assisted distribution, or not. The consensus was that CBS provided the best quality experience. The BBC was among a number of other broadcaster sites that failed to meet demand for live streams.
The CNN online video audience at its peak nearly doubled the previous internet record of 700,000 concurrent live streams served during a YouTube event. In all, CNN.com served 26.9 million live video streams during the day.
. . . CBS had the best offering according to some online observers, with multiple feeds using streaming technology from Move Networks.
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NewTeeVee | January 20, 2009
You may have heard, but Barack Obama gets to ditch the “-elect” part of his title today as he will be sworn in (shortly) as our new President. We’ve already provided an comprehensive list of where to watch the inauguration online, but here’s a quick review of what to expect from some of them, so far.
C-Span’s coverage is not very impressive. The video window was small, and choppy. Avoid.
CBS is offering 7 HD streams of the event, and they look awesome. Definitely the best of the lot — worth watching.
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Lost Remote | January 20, 2009
Here at the CBS stations we’re pretty proud of our HD inauguration player, too (see Cory’s recent post about MSNBC’s player). It has 7 user-switchable HD feeds from different angles around Washington, one of which is CBS’ anchored coverage. It also has video of all the inaugural speeches going back to FDR, and an embedded Twitter feed from the CBS stations’ national editorial team that highlights different elements as they happen.
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Streaming Media | January 20, 2009
I’ve now watched over a dozen live feeds of the inauguration from most of the major news portals and hands down, CBS has the best quality and most reliable stream. Others like MSNBC, C-SPAN and Hulu are some of the worst and at least a couple sites has videos that would not even load. He’s a quick run down on how the videos compare.
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