5 Lessons Learned from Streaming Media East 2011

I was fortunate enough to attend Streaming Media East this year. It's 2.5 days in New York City plus an additional day of classes on Monday. Throughout the days' classes, sessions, and throughout the tradeshow floor, I ran across five main themes.


1. H.264

Everything is going h.264. It seems to be the codec of choice. It works with many different wrappers including MP4, F4V, even Silverlight. There are also many tools that can convert h.264 to multiple devices and formats. But more on that later.


2. Adaptive streaming (smooth streaming, bandwidth throttling, whatever they call it)

Not new but "the next new thing." Nearly every major format has a version. The basic gist of it is that there are multiple versions of your streaming media file at various bandwidths (300kbps, 500kbps,...1500kbps, etc) The server determines what amount of bandwidth the viewer has available and chooses the correct file to play back.

At prescribed points in the file (usually every 2-5 seconds) the server can determine a different amount of available bandwidth and send a higher (or lower) bandwidth stream to the viewer. This is transparent to the user and provides a better experience for the viewer with no (or at least minimum) buffering.


3. Transmuxing

This the process of modifying the wrapper of the file to change its playback properties instead of transcoding the video. This is a much more efficient process than re-encoding the video. This process only modifies the wrapper leaving the video file intact.

Again, as I mentioned above, h.264 encoding helps to make transmuxing possible. Products like Wowza are making this easy. Wowza can transmux an h.264 stream to almost any format or device.


4. iDevice encoding

There is no doubt that people are consuming more streaming media on devices like iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets, etc. If you want to maximize your viewers, it is important that you create content for those devices and formats.

Again, h.264 appears to be a way to leverage a streaming file across multiple devices. You just need to make sure that you are encoding it with the proper parameters to work on those devices.


5. HTML5

Proabably the biggest buzz in the streaming media industry right now. If you are not including html5 video files on your web page, you should. It takes all of two lines of code to embed a video in html5. Plus, 4-6 more lines to include fail overs for flv and mp4.

With Chrome and Firefox (4.0) claiming html5 support and a rumored plug-in coming for IE9, the time is right to start using html5 video.

It also doesn't hurt that MPEGLA is proportedly claiming tthey will not collect royalties for "free" h.264 content. (This rumor does not and should not qualify as legal permission or even legal advice. In other words, if the statement is incorrect, don't blame me.)



Well there you have it. Five things learned at Streaming Media East this year. I wonder what next year will bring.

Well until then, happy streaming


-ARK