The “Other” Grammys Go Streaming
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.