Telepresence's shrinking presence

IBM adds Cisco Telepresence to its offering, while Cisco gobbles up Tandberg.

The world of telepresence offerings just got a little smaller, or at least more streamlined, as Cisco and Tandberg announced last week that the internetworking giant will buy the Oslo-based videoconferencing company.

Happening in the few weeks prior to the SUPERCOMM tradeshow, which re-emerges in Chicago in late October after several years in exile, the Cisco-Tandberg announcement gives Cisco CEO John Chambers yet another video-related acquisition to add to his presentation fodder. For those of you who may not follow the SUPERCOMM show, Chambers has done many keynotes over the years, with almost every one involving VoIP - voice or video over IP. Chambers has made to secret of the fact that video on IP networks is a growth area he would like to dominate.

The Tandberg announcement makes both strategic and financial sense, if seen in light of the recent IBM announcement that the tech giant will be offering the IBM Converged Communications Services-Managed Telepresence services for its consulting clients.

IBM says the offering will include "design, implementation, concierge and help desk, remote operations, and maintenance and support" and, in a nod to the best pun in recent press release history, IBM says it can provide customers with telepresence units that range from desktop"to life-size screens that sprawl the length of the room." No word yet whether LifeSize, itself a telepresence company that was founded by former Polycom / PictureTel executives, have used their sprawling telepresence units to complain about IBM's use of its name in a Cisco-IBM-Tandberg tie up.

Almost two years ago, an article in Streaming Media magazine talked about telepresence's place in the collaborative computing-streaming pantheon. In addition, a podcast recorded at the same time addressed some of the benefits of using a high-definition (HD) videoconferencing system as an inexpensive way to acquire  content for HD streaming [this would be real HD streaming, not Akamai's "it starts as HD so it must be an HD stream to the iPhone" version]. We think that any opportunity to drive forward HD telepresence - or even plain old HD videoconferencing - will ultimately benefit HD streaming. A forthcoming article on enterprise streaming for Streaming Media magazine will showcase a few best practices in using videoconferencing as remote acquisition tools for live and on-demand streaming content.

Coming back around to the Tandberg deal, Cisco is paying approximately $3 billion for Tandberg. Tiernan Ray over at Barron's blog has a good overview of different analysts' assessments of the deal, but he also points out what all of us who have lived in the videoconferencing world at some point in the past or present are wondering: what does this mean for Polycom? Given Polycom's proximity to Cisco (Milpitas is just an hour down the road from Cisco's headquarters) and the on-again / off-again relationship Polycom and Cisco have had over the years, it's shaping up to be a life-size drama in the making.

Akamai claims 45 million iPhones capable of playing back HD content

[Update, see the workflowed.com blog for a bit more detail on Akamai's "HD" delivery to the iPhone.]

For such a simple press conference, there certainly are a number of unanswered questions.  I like reporting the news, but every so often a claim is made ("first ever, only, etc") that has to be challenged.

An article I wrote on Tuesday, September 29, for StreamingMedia.com includes a link to an on-demand version of an Akamai press conference that had been streamed live that day (the on-demand version had a much cleaner playback quality than the actual live playback, which can be seen in the screenshot posted here).

Akamai was announcing their Akamai HD Network, hosted by Paul Sagan, CEO, and Tom Leighton, Co-founder and Chief Scientist. I have nothing against Akamai in particular, but unfortunately some of the claims made can't be substantiated.

One in particular struck me as key to the whole press conference. Leighton claimed (from 10 minutes 35 seconds to 10 minutes 58 seconds in the on-demand version)

 "Today there's [sic] 50 million homes that have connected gaming consoles - or other devices - that capable of displaying HD video, of getting it and displaying it into the home. Also, there's [sic] 45 million iPhones out there today capable of displaying HD video."

Let's take a look at the facts:

a). No one else has ever claimed that the 1st gen iPhone or even the iPhone 3G is capable of of HD playback, which is the only way to get to the 45 million iPhone number.

b) Even the claims that the iPhone 3GS is capable of displaying HD content are conjecture, as Apple does not allow HD playback on the iPhone 3GS (even 480p content can't be played back).

c) While everyone is doing "higher definition" for live streams to desktop Flash and Silverlight players, many are doing HTTP streams, and a few are doing true HD (480, 720, 1080i/p) to these same players, there are a limited number of companies doing true HD live streams via HTTP, which is where Akamai wants to tell its story. None are doing it to the iPhone, however.

The reason I say it is key to the whole press conference is this: if all Akamai is claiming is "higher definition" as its term for HD, there's no story here, since others are doing it. If they're claiming HD for the iPhone, there's a story here but not one they can support.

When I heard that claim about the 45 million HD-capable iPhones, I immediately posted a question on the webcast, which was not read during the live event; I've also written twice to the PR contact, who was helpful with a question about one of the speaker's names, but has also been silent on the misstatement by Leighton.

Oh, and I can't even get the on-demand version of the press conference to play on my iPhone 3GS.

Heads Up - Silverlight 3, Adobe AIR support Intel's Moblin OS

Intel, during its developer's forum, announced Moblin 2.1, the company's Linux distribution that is both media-centric and scalable. Both Adobe and Microsoft announced support for Moblin, with their respective AIR and Silverlight platforms.

See the write-up at StreamingMedia.com but here are a few other quotes.

The first two are from Elemental Technologies, a company that uses Graphics Processor Units (GPUs) to accelerate encoding and transcoding.


Sam Blackman, Elemental's CEO, has spent time researching Larrabee, and sees it as a positive for programmers.

"Larrabee uses a modified x86 multi-core architecture rather than the streaming architecture traditionally associated with GPUs," said Blackman. "This means there is a broader instruction set available to the programmer than with streaming processors, and thus certain operations can be performed with fewer lines of code. This doesn’t necessarily mean the code will run faster or more efficiently, of course. While I don’t know the details of this specific example, my guess is that they are running the code entirely on Larrabee rather than 'pulling' any back to the CPU.

"It's definitely an interesting architecture and great for us," said Andy Beach, VP of Marketing at Elemental. "It adds yet more competition into the hardware space that, to date, was dominated by GPU-only cards. We can provide an even more appealing offer, I think, as we actually use both CPU and GPU in our transcoding."

Heads Up - Adobe Elements 8 announced

Adobe today announced the mid-October availability of its Adobe Elements 8 packages, both Photoshop Elements 8 and Premiere Elements 8. Windows versions are available for both Elements, while Mac users will have to settle for the Photoshop Element only.

Adobe says the products fit in the "hobbyist" area of Adobe's mass-market push, the opposite end of a continuum that includes Photoshop CS4 on the high end and Elements at the low end. Still, with previous versions of Elements that we’ve reviewed, the hobbyist versions hold their own on basic tasks.

During a pre-release conference call, an Adobe spokesperson mentioned that Elements is, essentially, a balance of ease of use with power or "headroom.”

“We continuously hear from focus groups that they want software that's straightforward and easy to use,” he said, “but they don't want us to limit the software in case the user wants to do more complex edits.”

We’ll highlight a few key features in each program, demonstrated during the pre-release conference call, and then we’ll follow up with a hands-on review. There’s also an online component, which we won’t address here, other than to note that online albums support video now, as well as photos.

ORGANIZER

Adobe has spent quite a bit of time updating Elements Organizer, its "Ultimate Media Management Hub." Organizer has been part of Photoshop Elements since version 3, but the company is now shipping Organizer with Premiere Elements 8 for Windows, or as part of the bundle of both Elements.

Adobe’s rationale for expanding Organizer is that user capture devices are capturing both photos and videos. This blurring of the lines between photo and video capture devices means management of those two types in the same place is important.

Auto Analyzer

Organizer has an auto-analyzer tool that tags shots and videos for quality and interest, as well as other key tagging examples Adobe gleaned from user focus groups.

Smart Tags will filter down to particular types of content (one face, two faces, small group, etc) and auto-classify the content. Additionally, in terms of quality, the auto-analyze function can find images that are too dark or too bright or other quality characteristics. Scores based on high or low quality, such as blurriness, contrast, provide a subjective quality basis so that images can be rapidly filtered or eliminated.

This analysis also includes "people recognition" as a way to eliminate the need to manually add tags when a person appears within a video scene or a still image. This

people finder works on the principle of finding a face, then prompting for name of person. As the name is entered, Organizer begins to build up information about the person, offering an auto-complete function for names, then moving on to giving suggestions from a list of names. 

In one example during the conference call, Adobe demonstrated that the manual cataloging of five shots apiece for two people was all it took before the auto-analyzer  began to suggest one name from a list of possible names whenever that person appeared in a shot. The system then moves on to a more definitive suggestion, asking "is this . . . ?"

Keyword tagging for video is a bit more complex, and Adobe acknowledges that tagging isn’t always based on the first frame of video.

“Tagging is based on content,” the spokesperson said, “so keywords can be added at any time while watching the video. Tags are applied to on a scene-by-scene basis rather than the entire video.”

Organizer also contains a full-screen preview, much like iPhoto on the Mac. Users can use full-screen to expand images to a much larger size, making the choice of images or video playback much easier in full-screen mode. To quickly edit particular images a quick edit panel pops up to deal with one-click issues such as rotation or auto-color adjustments. Video tagging can also be performed in the full-screen mode.

PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS

Photoshop Elements 8 has three primary new features: Photomerge Exposure, Recompose and Quick fix previews.

Photomerge Exposure offers the user the ability to make extensive light and dark adjustments to specific areas of an image.  For example, let’s say you have an image of your wife standing in front of the Eiffel Tower at night with the tower lit and fill flash on your wife.  Chance are good that the either the tower is too dark, or your wife is too bright.  Not that having an overly bright wife is a bad thing.  The exposure tool will allow you to adjust brightness on either the tower or your wife to improve the image quality.  Photomerge differs from Photoshop’s HDR capabilities by only fine-tuning exposure in a single image as opposed to merging multiple copies of the same image taken at different exposures.

Recompose borrows an algorithm from Photoshop CS4 called Content Aware Scaling.  This tool allows you to scale an image without distorting the content.  If you have two or more people in a scene that aren’t close enough together for your liking, this tool will allow you to “squeeze” them together without making them look squished.  It also works vertically which can be useful for eliminating unwanted backgrounds.  You can specify the areas that you want the algorithm to keep or discard by using a green or red brush and “painting” over parts of the image.

PREMIERE ELEMENTS

Premiere Elements 8 has a series of “smart” features, including Smart Fix, Smart Trim,  and Smart Mix. It has also added motion tracking and newer “instant movie themes,” effects, and transitions.

Smart Tools

Smart Fix in Premiere Elements performs essentially the same image adjustments to video clips as it does to still images in Photoshop Elements.  It performs a quick evaluation of the video content and adjusts characteristics such as brightness and contrast to improve troublesome clips or simply to make an already good clip look even better.

Smart Trim is a particularly innovative new tool in Premiere Elements 8.  This tool analyzes a video clip and identifies suggested cut points inside of the clip.  One of the ways the algorithm accomplishes this is by looking for motion.  Let’s say you have a clip of Tiger Woods lining up a 25 foot putt.  He may remain stationary for 30 seconds before he finally putts the ball.  Smart Trim will look past all of the heightening drama before the putt and suggest an “in” point just before he swings his club. Accepting a Smart Trim suggestion results in a non-destructive trim (meaning it can always be undone later).

Smart Mix can also be called an auto-ducking feature for audio.  It will find the points in a dialogue audio track that voices are heard.  It can then automatically mix the other audio tracks, such as music or sound effects, down so the dialogue stands out loud and clear.

ECONOMICAL MOTION TRACKING

This new version of Premiere Elements ships with a feature usually only found in professional level post-production software, motion tracking.  In the Adobe demo that we viewed, this feature performed very accurately and quickly.  The tracker can be set to follow a point of interest in a clip; then an object can be assigned to “follow” the parent.  Other video clips, titles, animated clip art, or images can all be assigned to follow an object on the screen.

BONUS FEATURES

Adobe now offers additional options for output of completed videos.  The ability to directly upload to YouTube is a feature included under the “Share” tab.  This export option will automatically format your finished masterpiece for optimal viewing on the popular video-sharing site.  Also Podbean is a new partner of Adobe allowing users to directly upload vodcasts to their account.

Any purchase of Elements 8 includes 2GB of storage on Photoshop.com.  Although the Mac version does not include the Organizer, it does include Adobe Bridge CS4 which can be used in place of another organizer such as iPhoto.  Photoshop and Premiere Elements 8 are available immediately as a bundle for Windows computers for $149.99.  Photoshop Elements for the Mac retails for $99.99.  Both will ship on October 23, 2009.

Heads Up - iPhone 3G / 3GS Commuter TL case

In our last review of an iPhone 3G / 3GS case, we looked at the ultra rugged OtterBox Defender. I also mentioned the somewhat sleeker Impact series and have since found a good review of Impact for the 3G (http://www.notebooks.com/2009/04/14/review-otterbox-impact-case-for-iphone-3g/).

Otterbox now offers a middle option: the just-launched Commuter TL series.

Awaiting a sample and will update this post with a comparison to the Defender once it arrives.

iPhoned

IBC Companies of Interest

Finishing up IBC, the international broadcasting show held in Amsterdam each year. Found a few companies of interest that are related to the digital media and streaming spaces. There were several more, which I'll comment on in more detail in future posts:

Abit  Hall 8, stand 8.A28a. Playout automation specialist, Abit Ltd, will show its new, cost effective, ‘compact’ automation system for the first time at IBC this year. The system takes 17 years development knowledge and delivers it in a small platform capable of providing workflow and playout automation for up to three transmission channels.

Accedo Broadband Hall 12 Stand IP621.  Provider of interactive content and applications for IPTV and Connected TV. At IBC, Accedo will be launching a range of social media applications, as well as some History Channel-based applications. As well as this they will be presenting new game features, including the world's first Full HD gaming and 3D components using SVG technology.

Advanced Digital Broadcast Hall 5, Stand 5.B48  Advanced Digital Broadcast will show how it is helping its customers to meet the challenges of delivering an enhanced consumer TV experience with linear and on-demand entertainment services across hybrid networks. Operators are challenged to bring together more content from more places, making programs and services easy to find, and presenting multimedia in new and exciting ways. In its booth at IBC, ADB will show a number of demonstrations of how it is enabling television, Internet and personal content to converge and be accessible where consumers enjoy it most: on their flat screen TV. Approximately 70% of ADB’s workforce is dedicated to engineering; developing products across all the digital television technology platforms including cable, Internet Protocol (IP), satellite and terrestrial. The company is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland with its main Research and Development facility in Zielona Gora, Poland and Operations division in Taipei, Taiwan. ADB has local representation in Australia, Italy, Singapore, Spain, the Ukraine, the United States and the United Kingdom.

AmberFin iCR v5 now supports a few additional tools for ingest into Avid systems, including JPEG 2000 (for intermediate mastering format for high quality content such as movies, offering superior image quality with 10 bits of information for each pixel), closed captioning (applies closed captioning seamlessly for US and European broadcast delivery content and conversion), MXF AS02 (includes highly efficient new MXF application designed for streamlined New Media Factory operations and Avid interplay: AmberFin iCR (streamlining the process when working in an AVID editing environment, offering instant interoperability in delivery preparation, freeing up critical edit suites to deliver value for editing workflows).

Broadcast International CE-1000 is designed for IPTV, satellite and Telco service providers and delivers a very cost effective way to solve their bandwidth crisis. It’s a software-based encoder featuring Broadcast International’s highly efficient, fully compliant H.264 codec.

Envivio Hall 1, stand, 1.D72. Envivio's new iLiveTV solution for the Apple iPhone and SilverLiveTV for Microsoft Silverlight. We will also bring you up to date information about ongoing deployments around the world, such as the recent announcement of new Mobile TV service launched by Digita Oy, which is owned by France’s TDF. Finland’s leading distributor of radio and television services, Digita is using Envivio to deliver ten channels of high quality, DVB-H encoded, free-to-air and pay-tv mobile television to be offered by mobile operators in Finland’s top markets.

Ross Video  XPression, an all-in-one real-time 3D Character Generator and Motion Graphics System. Fully Unicode compliant directly supporting a wide variety of languages. Developed by a team with a long background as on-air graphics operators, it plays well with industry leading graphics file formats like Photoshop™ and 3D Studio Max™ files to generate a compelling and sophisticated graphic look. XPression offers individual control of up to 7 templates of graphics on a single channel – eliminating the need for costly additional channels and systems. It can accommodate a variety of workflows from fully manual playback stand-alone setups to distributed configurations controlled by custom applications and newsroom systems. This makes XPression the perfect solution for news, production studio and outside broadcast productions.

SatStream – SatStream is Europe's largest bespoke broadcast-standards facility specifically designed for content acquisition from Satellite and broadcast by Streaming via the Internet. SatStream's facilities have been enjoyed by a wide mix of broadcasters, events management, production, and content companies, including Microsoft, Endemol, BBC, CNN, France 24, and Euronews.  SatStream recently streamed three Manchester City matches. The matches were part of the Vodacom challenge, a pre-season football event now in its tenth year, hosted in South Africa. 

Softron Hall 3 at 3.A48  Multi-channel H.264 recording compliance (MovieRecorder Express) and a new version of MovieRecorder (edit during ingest software tool): MovieRecorder 2.0 supports multiple SD and HD formats, either compressed or uncompressed.  It allows video clips being captured to be stored to multiple locations simultaneously. Ingests can be scheduled over time or can be manually triggered.  Pro option now allows the capture of proxy clips.  These proxy clips are low bit rate versions of the actual material, significantly smaller in size and can be edited in Final Cut Pro. Editing on a proxy file is ideal for use on notebook computers or over local area networks. It also accelerates the rendering process and enables more real time editing. Edit-while-ingest also works with proxy files, which means that you can start editing in Final Cut Pro on your laptop on a Local Area Network, while it’s capturing. 

TrustedOpinion social recommendation platform delivers recommendations for any variety of products, services, and content. The company drives consumer confidence by generating personalized recommendations based on the opinions of your network of friends. Since public launch in Feb’07, TrustedOpinion.com has attracted over a million members and is growing. TrustedOpinion is based in San Francisco, CA.

TXT Polymedia Polymedia Live acquires video content and encodes them into multiple output formats; Polymedia Show is the advanced video player combining standard PC player functionalities with those of Polymedia MAM to easily and quickly manage video content, its related advertising inputs together with e-commerce innovative functions. Also, a demonstration of the IBC 2009 Innovation Awards shortlisted project “Smart content repurposing system for Linear & VOD Tv Programmes services” developed for the customer Mediaset, is also available at stand. The project represents a multi-screen approach application that provides Mediaset with a complete workflow enabling efficient video content repurposing in new media.

V4x Hall 2 – Stand 2.B31 V4x Debuts Interactive "Social Radio" Player for the Web and iPhone (including Interactivity, Chat, Quizzes, Contests and Video improve monetization for Radio Streaming Channels).  V4x is focused on providing high-quality interactive OnAir Widgets for web and mobile services. Offers webcasters new revenue opportunities through social networking, at the IBC Exhibition held in Amsterdam from September 11-15, 2009.  The V4x interactive web player provides a customized interface that extends the user experience, allowing users to fully participate in the streamcast – beyond traditional programming – with interactive widgets like live, moderated chat; quizzes and polls; animated banners, even live in-studio videos or channel events.

Review: QuickTime Player X

For those upgrading to Snow Leopard, Apple's most recent enhancement to its core operating system, the look-and-feel updates to applications such as the QuickTime Player X are a welcome addition.

As mentioned in an article I'd written for StreamingMedia.com,  QuickTime Player X eliminates borders and windows around the actual video playback, and embeds the controls directly in to the lower quarter of the video playback window. Look familiar? It's based on the iPhone's video playback window.

Even more than just the updated look, though, QuickTime Player X uses the best bits of iPhone video protocol handling. As I'd mentioned in another article, HTTP streaming and the ability to trim and share videos was available on the iPhone before it ever launched on the desktop player application.

Here, though, the good news ends. While QuickTime Player X integrates a few of the Pro features from its predecessor, QuickTime Player 7, it drops cuts-only editing altogether and dumbs down export to "save as" and "save for web" options - both of which have significantly reduced export capabilities.

Here is an example of a small portion of the export options in QuickTime Player 7:

Now here is the only set of export options in QuickTime Player X:

Significant difference!

Note that QuickTime Player 7 contained all the export options of QuickTime Player X (AppleTV, iPod / iPhone and computer), so this is not about Apple adding functionality. It's as if making a "pretty" product got in the way of making a functional product, at least when the previous product did so much more than the "new and improved" one.

To be completely fair, there is one more screen on QuickTime Player X: the Save for Web option. As the picture below shows, however, there aren't very many options (about half of what was available on a similar screen in QuickTime Player 7):

Even more disturbing, what's been left out of the exporting options on QuickTime Player X is anything that doesn't fit in Apple's direct sphere of influence: if you don't want to export to iPod, iPhone, AppleTV or a Mac, you're out of luck with QuickTime Player X.

It's as if Apple is foregoing QuickTime's promise and premise to work across the board with a variety of formats and output options, instead closing ranks around its own products at the expense of extensibility.

Fortunately, for those who upgrade to Snow Leopard (10.6) from the Leopard (10.5) operating system, Apple leave QuickTime Player 7 on the upgrade machine. Whether this is an oversight, or a nod to the fact that QuickTime X was shipped too early, the fact that QuickTime Player 7 is still functional is welcome news.


In summary, we applaud Apple's attempt to simplify a part of the export process for the average user, but not at the expense of the power user who found the earlier versions of QuickTime to be quite powerful workflow enhancers. We would at least expect QuickTime Player X to have a simplified "Share" section and a more robust "Export" section, even if the latter were hidden a level down below the basic export options.

Instead, what we get is a very crippled version of an older system that worked quite nicely. So much for progress!



[Tested on 10.6.1 with QuickTime Player 7 version 7.6.3 (build 630) and QuickTime Player X version 10.0 (build 51)]