March 18, 2013
Volume XLIII, Issue 2
Netflix Launches $100,000 Cloud Prize
Excerpted from Digital Media Wire Report by Ray Bolger
Netflix, the subscription video service, on Thursday announced a new competition challenging developers to improve various aspects of cloud computing. The Netflix Cloud Prize will award $100,000 in total prize money — $10,000 in each of 10 categories.
Entries will be accepted through September 15th, with winners announced in October. "Cloud computing has become a hot topic recently, but the technology is still just emerging," said Neil Hunt, the Chief Product Officer at Netflix. "No doubt many of the key ideas that will take it to the next level have yet to be conceived, explored and developed." Complete details are available here.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 We're very excited to announce that additional speakers for our upcoming CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE at the 2013 NAB Show taking place at the Las Vegas Convention Center on April 8th and 9th in Las Vegas, NV.
Our 2013 event track will demonstrate the new ways cloud-based solutions are providing increased reliability and security, not only for commercial broadcasting and enterprise applications, but also for military and government implementations.
From collaboration during production, to post-production and formatting, to interim storage, delivery, and playback on fixed and mobile devices, to viewership measurement and big-data analytics, cloud computing is having an enormous impact on high-value multimedia distribution.
The 2013 Conference has been extended from one to two full-days reflecting the increased importance of and growing interest in its subject matter. We're also very pleased to announce new conference speakers.
DAY ONE will begin with an "Industry Update on Cloud Adoption."
How are cloud-based technologies currently being deployed throughout the audio/video (A/V) ecosystem? What file-based workflow strategies, products, and services are now working best?
After an introductory presentation by Mark Ramberg, Amazon Web Services, a panel discussion with Dr. Frank Aycock, Appalachian State University; Jonathan Hurd, Altman Vilandrie; Rob Kay, Strategic Blue; and Patrick Lopez, Core Analysis, will thoroughly examine this emerging market segment.
Next, we'll discuss "Outstanding Issues: Reliability & Security." What remaining pitfalls cause producers and distributors to resist migrating to the cloud? How are liability, predictability, privacy, and safety considerations being addressed?
Speaker Shekhar Gupta, Motorola Mobility, will introduce the topic. And then a panel with Lawrence Freedman, Edwards Wildman Palmer; Tanya Frerichs, Docusign; Jason Shah, Mediafly; and John Schiela, Phoenix Marketing International, will follow-up with further discussion.
Then "Cloud Solutions for Content Creation" will be our subject. How is cloud computing being used for collaboration and other pre-production functions? What do dailies-screening and editing in the cloud offer the content production process?
Speaker Patrick MacDonald King, DAX will explore this area first. And then a panel with Sean Barger, Equilibrium; Morgan Fiumi, Sfera Studios; Rob Green, Abacast; and Robert Blackburn, Equinix, will continue our examination.
"Post-Production in the Cloud" will follow. What do cloud solutions bring to post-production functions such as animation and graphics generation? How are formatting, applying metadata, and transcoding improved by cloud computing?
Our DAY ONE Marquee Keynote Chris Launey of Disney will speak first.
Then a panel with Jim Duval, Telestream; Joe Foxton, MediaSilo; Jun Heider, RealEyes; and Bill Sewell, Wiredrive, will delve into this topic in more detail.
Next, we'll discuss "Cloud-Based Multimedia Storage." How are data centers and content delivery networks (CDNs) at the edge evolving? What do business-to-business (B2B) storage solutions and consumer "cloud media lockers" have in common?
Speaker Jean-Luc Chatelain, DataDirect Networks, will address the topic first. And then a panel with Bang Chang, XOR Media; Tom Gallivan, WD; Mike Wall, Amplidata; and Douglas Trumbull, Trumbull Ventures, will follow up with further discussion.
DAY ONE will end with "Content Delivery from the Cloud." How is cloud computing being used to enable distribution and playback on multiple fixed and mobile platforms? What does the cloud offer to improve the economics of "TV Everywhere?"
Speaker Chris Rittler, Deluxe Digital Distribution, will explore this area first. And then a panel with Scott Brown, Octoshape; Brian Campanotti, Front Porch Digital; Malik Khan, LTN Global Communications; and Mike West, GenosTV, will continue the examination
DAY TWO will open with four cloud implementation case studies.
How was cloud computing used most successfully during 2012 in the multimedia content distribution chain? What lessons can be learned from these deployments that will benefit other industry players?
Case studies will be presented by Jason Suess, Microsoft; Michelle Munson, Aspera; Keith Goldberg, Fox Networks, and Ryan Korte, Level 3; and Baskar Subramanian, Amagi Media Labs. Then the presenters will join in a panel discussion.
Next, we'll look at "Changes in Cloud Computing." How is the cloud-computing industry changing in relation to content rights-holders? What new specialized functions-in-the-cloud, interoperability improvements, and standardization are coming this year?
First, David Cerf, Crossroads Systems; Margaret Dawson, Symform; Jeff Malkin, Encoding; and Venkat Uppuluri, Gaian Solutions, will join in a panel. And then Mark Davis, Scenios, will speak on this topic.
"A Future Vision of the Cloud" will explore what to expect next. What do the latest forecasts project about the ways that cloud-computing solutions will continue to impact the A/V ecosystem over the long term? How will the underlying businesses that are based on content production and distribution be affected?
Panelists Lindsey Dietz, ODCA; John Gildred, SyncTV; Mike Sax, ACT; and Sam Vasisht, Veveo, will join in the discussion.
"Military & Government Cloud Requirements" will follow. How do the needs of military branches and government agencies for securely managing multimedia assets differ from the private sector? What do these requirements have in common with commercial practices?
Michael Weintraub, Verizon, will speak first. Then Scott Campbell, SAP America; Fabian Gordon, Ignite Technologies; Linda Senigaglia, HERTZ NeverLost; and Alex Stein, Eccentex, will go into more depth.
Next, we'll explore "Unique Cloud-Based Solutions." What are cloud solutions providers currently developing to address specific considerations of the intelligence community (IC) in fulfilling its missions? How will these approaches evolve and change during 2013?
DAY TWO Marquee Keynote Saul Berman of IBM, will address this area first.
Then David Bornstein, Akamai; Rajan Samtani, Industry Consultant; Ganesh Sankaran, PrimeFocus; and Dan Schnapp, Hughes Hubbard & Reed, will continue this examination.
Four relevant cloud Case studies will follow.
How is cloud computing being used to help securely manage sensitive multimedia? What lessons can be learned from these deployments that will benefit military and government organizations?
Grant Kirkwood, Unitas Global; William Michael, NEC Corporation; Randy Kreiser, DataDirect Networks; and John Delay, Harris, will present case studies.
These presenters will then join in a panel discussion.
The Conference Closing will tie back to the commercial sector. How do those involved in multimedia production, storage, and distribution leverage cloud-based solutions to their fullest potential? What resources are available for comparing notes and staying current on the latest developments?
Our closing session speakers will be Steve Russell, Tata Communications, and Jeffrey Stansfield, Advantage Video Systems.
There are special discount codes for DCINFO readers to attend the NABShow. The code for $100 off conference registration is EP35. And the code for FREE exhibit-only registration is EP04. Share wisely, and take care.
Amazon, the Mother of All Clouds
Excerpted from ComputerWorld Report by Peter Wayner
Ah, Amazon -- did Jeff Bezos choose that name to symbolize the largest bookstore in the world or did he realize that he would one day create an enterprise cloud service that was as large and complex as the river basin? After spending some time with his enterprise infrastructure service, I think he saw this coming.
Selling servers by the hour was a bold idea when the Amazon cloud business launched a few years ago, but it seems quaint compared to all the options for sale today. There are currently 21 products available on Amazon Web Services, and only one of them is the classic EC2 machine, an abbreviation of the full name, the Elastic Compute Cloud. The original Simple Storage Service (S3) now has cousins like the Simple Workflow Service and SimpleDB, a nonrelational data store. Then there are odder innovations like Amazon Glacier, a very cheap storage solution that takes hours to retrieve the data. Yes, hours. Not milliseconds, not seconds, not minutes — but hours.
It's impossible to summarize it all in a paragraph or even an article. Amazon Web Services would require a book, but that tome would be out of date by the time it was printed because the service changes quickly. The best news is that Amazon is constantly looking at costs and generally lowering prices as it finds a way to deliver the product for less. Some prices have gone up occasionally over the years, an effort to make the prices reflect reality.
Amazon has also found plenty of supporters. A number of big companies such as Netflix are proud of using Amazon's servers, and plenty of startups are glad they didn't need to set up their own data centers to reach for the gold ring of IPO riches. Some customers brag about spending $1 million or more a month, an amount that would be more than enough for most companies to justify setting up an in-house facility and team. Clearly, Amazon is delivering a whole lot of value.
A smorgasbord of possibilities.
The vast array of options is probably what keeps people coming back. When I started setting up a few test machines, it was clear Amazon had expanded the options until they no longer seem like commodities. There are at least 16 different sizes of machines. The instances generally bundle more RAM with more CPU cores and more disk space, but you can also choose lopsided versions that are heavier on the RAM, the CPU, or the I/O.
The size is just the first feature you can choose. There's back-end storage that can be mounted and you can fiddle with the amount of disk space. If you like, you can add Elastic Block Store (EBS), which is disk space that lives in the racks near you. This can be faster or slower and backed by more or less RAID protection.
There are so many options that spinning up an Amazon machine is almost as complicated and as flexible as buying a custom server. It's a bit like a toy store because you have to resist the temptation to play with cutting-edge technology -- such as one of the machines jammed full of Nvidia Tesla GPUs ready to run highly parallel algorithms written to Nvidia's CUDA platform. The mind often boggles.
Decoding the pricing table will take some collaboration between the CFO and the CIO. Not only are there 16 different-sized machines, but you can pay to reserve them in advance. If you pay a portion up front, Amazon will cut the hourly price along the way. It's sort of like one of those warehouse clubs where a membership buys you a discount. If you're judicious it's probably worth it, but it will take you some time to predict how much you'll use the machines.
The options aren't just in the size or configuration of the machine. The startup process offers a number of sophisticated options for customizing the distro from the beginning. You can, for instance, set up a "security profile" that controls which ports are open or shut immediately. This saves you the trouble of logging in after creating the machine and configuring the ports manually, a feature that's essential if you're going to start and stop dozens, hundreds, or thousands of machines.
Benchmarking the cloud.
I spent some time running benchmarks on the micro machine, Amazon's low-end model that's supposed to be able to handle bursts of extreme computation. It's intended for people who are either just testing some ideas or building a low-traffic machine. It costs only 2 cents per hour and comes with 613MB of RAM, an odd number that's probably an even fraction of some power of two minus a little overhead.
It was surprisingly hard to find a way to log into the machines. I couldn't get the public/private keys generated by Amazon to work with either PuTTY or the built-in Java-based SSH client. Yet it worked in seconds from my Mac's terminal. I wonder what kind of laptops are popular up at Amazon?
Little issues like this appeared fairly often during my time poking around the cloud. Amazon's Web portal is one of the more sophisticated tools available, offering more extensive diagnostics and hand-holding than the dashboards of competitors, but it is not always foolproof.
For instance, it offers a nice dialog box for helping you connect immediately to your instance with your SSH by formatting the command line. It worked some of the time for me, but it failed when it tried to get me to log into one of my Ubuntu instances as root, a problem that took five seconds to fix once I remembered that I was supposed to log in as "ubuntu." Any Unix user should be able to work around all of these tiny glitches. In fact they're only noticeable because Amazon sets such a high bar with the quality of its portal.
The speed I saw with the machines wasn't very exciting. I tried the DaCapo Java benchmarks, a test suite that includes several computationally intensive tasks, including running a Tomcat server. The results were generally three to five times slower than the low-end machines on Microsoft's Windows Azure and often six to nine times slower than the low-end machines on Joyent's cloud. However, these numbers weren't perfectly consistent. On the Avrora simulation of a sensor network, the EC2 micro machine was faster than Joyent's, and it took only about 45 percent more time to finish than the low-end Azure machine.
The Joyent machines are priced at about 3 cents an hour, a small premium considering the gap in performance. The Azure machines have an introductory price of 1.3 cents per hour — cheaper than Amazon's micros, though they're dramatically faster.
Bigger, faster, more.
For comparison, I also booted up what Amazon calls a high-CPU machine that offers two virtual cores, each delivering 2.5 (in Amazon parlance) ECUs or Elastic Compute Units. That's five ECUs all together. The micro machine is supposed to offer two ECUs in bursts, while the high-CPU machine offers five ECUs all of the time. The price is dramatically higher -- 16.5 cents per hour -- but that includes 1.7GB of RAM. Again, what happened to our old friends, the powers of two?
The high-CPU machine was usually six to eight times faster than the micro machine, suggesting that the ECUs are just a rough measurement. The results were close in speed to the Joyent machine and often a bit faster, but at more than five times the price. It's worth noting for algorithm nerds that the DaCapo benchmarks used two threads when possible on the Amazon machine but were limited to one thread on the Joyent and Azure boxes.
Once again, this suggests that the algorithm designer, the build master, and the CFO are going to need to sit down and decide whether to buy bigger, faster machines for more money or live with a larger number of slower, cheaper machines.
More fun comes when you start exploring the other corners of the Amazon toy store. The pay-as-you-go Hadoop cloud, called Elastic MapReduce, lets you upload a JAR file, push a button and start the computational wheels turning. You stick the data in the Amazon's storage cloud, S3, and the results show up there when everything is done.
There's a separate cloud of machines devoted to doing Hadoop processing. At least it looks separate, because you buy the compute cycles through a different Web page, but it could all be running in the same floating network of machines. That's the point.
If you want your Hadoop job to begin as soon as a machine is available, you pay the list prices. If you want to gamble a bit and wait for empty machines, the spot market lets you put in a lower bid and wait until spare machines are available for that price. Amazon is experimenting with constantly running an auction for compute power. This is yet another wrinkle for the engineers and the accountants to spend time discussing.
Beyond commoditization.
My favorite, relatively new feature is the Amazon Glacier, a backup system that takes hours to recover the data. Many people looked at Amazon's first cloud storage solution (S3) and found it was too expensive for backups or other data that wasn't accessed very often. One-size-fits-all solutions are one of the limitations of the cloud. Amazon designed S3 to meet the needs of servers that must access data relatively quickly.
As I mentioned before, there's no easy way to cover all of Amazon Web Services in one article like this. The only solution is to wade in, start booting up machines, and begin testing your application. Amazon offers some very basic services for free to help new customers, but for the most part it costs only a few cents to try out the different sizes. Then you can sit down with your accountant and start pricing out the services.
My impression is that Amazon's cloud has evolved into the high-end Cadillac of the breed. It provides extensive documentation, more hand-holding, and more sophisticated features than rivals, all at a price that is higher than the competition. Perhaps the competition's rates are only temporary and perhaps they're unsustainable, but maybe Amazon's rate is the price you pay for all of the extra features. Amazon's cloud is loaded with them.
Cache as Cache Can: Cable Cozies up to nDVR
Excerpted from CED Magazine Report by Mike Robuck
Network-based DVR services have been waiting in the wings for years now, but their big debut seems to be only a matter of time now that content rights issues are thawing out and the network architectures are taking shape.
Among the big cable operators in the United States, nDVR will be, when paired with a content delivery network or cloud, one of the legs that TV Everywhere services stand on once it's enabled.
It's been several years now since Cablevision was allowed by the courts to fire up its remote storage (RS)-DVR service, but in the meantime, Comcast has conducted an nDVR trial of its own in Augusta, Ga., Time Warner Cable has finished up its own CDN and has elements of nDVR in play with its Start Over and Look Back services, while Charter Communications CEO Tom Rutledge has hinted that his company is interested in deploying its own nDVR service.
All well and good, but unfortunately, all three declined to discuss their respective nDVR plans with CED. There's a convergence afoot of nDVR, video-on-demand (VoD) and TV Everywhere services at the headend, and vendors stand at the ready position with their various enabling platforms.
"The interest level has been very, very good," said Bob Scheffler, Vice President of Strategic Technology at Motorola Home. "I think network DVR is one of the hot topics that everyone wants to understand and hear about, so I think the interest level is very high. There's been a lot of discussion about the economics and when does it make sense, and kind of clearing up misconceptions about the economy of replacing hard drives in set-top boxes. We see a couple of real drivers around multi-screen and TV Everywhere and how to bring that DVR functionality, not necessarily to replace hard drives in set-top boxes, but actually how to add DVR capability to devices that don't have a hard drive, so to connected TVs, tablets, phones and those kinds of things.
"Usually, with a customer, it starts out about network DVR, and then this ties to rights questioning, including what can you do in home, out of the home? Meaning does it have to be remote storage DVR, like Cablevision, or is it cloud DVR, which I call the whole world DVR?" Network, or cloud, DVR puts video recordings into the cloud or CDN, which is also where cable operators such as Time Warner Cable and Comcast are putting electronic program guides (EPGs) for faster interface management. In theory, cable operators could cut down on truck rolls and expensive set-top boxes with nDVR services, but the cost of building or renting a cloud could offset those savings.
And nDVR is a service that records a program and stores it in a network for viewing by a large number of subscribers. RS-DVR grants a subscriber the right to record a service and store it, but each user has to have his or her own copy. In essence, RS-DVR is a virtual DVR that has remote storage.
"The way I look at it is network DVR is the total umbrella, but very specific types of rules around network DVR makes it RS-DVR-compliant," Scheffler said. "I don't look at them separately. It's just that there's a specific set of rules around network DVR that makes it RS-DVR-compliant."
In theory, cable operators can reduce customer churn by offering a sticky nDVR service to subscribers.
On the other end, subscribers can watch stored content on PCs, iOS, Android and other devices anywhere and anytime. On top of those opportunities sits targeted advertising, which would bring incremental revenue to cable operators and please programmers with the Internet-like reporting metrics.
You gotta fight for your nDVR rights.
When it comes to nDVR, the elephant in the room has been getting content licensing agreements from content owners and programmers.
Comcast's multi-platform deal with Fox Networks included granting multi-platform rights to Fox's video content, which was further proof that rights issues are picking up speed between cable operators and programmers.
"I think we're in a really interesting place around content rights now because of the TV Anywhere concept of: 'How do I get all of the content everywhere?' And I think there's a flurry of activity where people are negotiating broad rights to be able to deliver content to many different platforms and to have it stored in many different locations, including in the cloud," said Joshua Danovitz, Vice President and General Manager of international at TiVo. "So the lines of where you can put something I think are being blurred.
The idea that a piece of content is licensed for a specific individual seems to continue to be rather consistent."
Danovitz said having content rights could drive technological innovations, such as the BBC's popular iPlayer. Conrad Clemson, Director of Strategy and Business Development for Cisco's Service Provider Video Technology Group, said content rights are incredibly complicated, but some areas, such as Europe, are further along than North America.
So while content rights for nDVR are thawing, it will take a while for the floodgates to open.
"There seems to be some confusion around that," Motorola's Scheffler said. "In my opinion, it's not going to be a switch that gets turned on or off and everything switches to the other. It's going to be a blend for years. Some channels won't give the rights, so the only way to do it is RS-DVR using the copyright law and fair use doctrine as kind of the cover for it. But other channels can greatly benefit from de-linearizing their video and just make it live TV converted to VOD. So for some channels and some services, you're going to be able to do a common copy or shared copy across the big pool of subscribers and proactively record, even if it wasn't requested.
"I think it's going to be a several-year road here, where you slowly see this opening up channel by channel, and then in some cases within a channel during very specific times of day. Maybe late night you can record a common shared copy, but maybe primetime you can't. Certainly with live sports, you can't because there are lots of people in the food chain for who gets paid with big, major sporting events."
Once the rights are secured, Buckeye CableSystem CTO Joe Jensen said the nDVR service needs to mirror the home DVR service.
"Once you've got the rights identified and what constraints you have almost on a per-channel basis, you now have to look at the architecture and understand how you are going to be delivering the content," Jensen said. "Where should you have your primary storage? Where do you want to place your caching in order to optimize your network and still make it close enough to the customer that you have good control as you move down the food chain? You need to consider how you handle advertising and ad insertion.
If that's an option, do we have those rights, and when will we have an efficient platform that will allows us to insert fresh ads in anything past day three potentially? "There's authentication that needs to be brought in, and is that dealt with on a regional basis? How do you now manage to communicate in real time with your billing and back office systems to make sure that all of these things are legitimately delivered to customers? We're still a ways away from getting all of that taken care of, too."
Vendors take to the field, labs.
On the vendor front, Envivio's Halo network media processor has been deployed in an nDVR setting in Europe and is in trials with two top 10 MSOs in the United States.
Arnaud Perrier, vice president of solutions at Envivio, said that in regard to nDVR, Halo was designed to work with multiple copies, which includes a unique copy stored per user, or with a shared copy in storage, including individual playlists, depending on the legal environment.
"In either case, we can scale it for millions of simultaneous users, which is one of the main challenges for MSOs," Perrier said.
Perrier said that cable operators need to provide parity between the nDVR services on companion screens and what consumers are used to seeing on their TV screens.
"From my perspective, you really need to understand how you want to, from a user interface and user experience perspective, present VOD versus network DVR and how you can come as close as possible to the experience that a customer has with a customer-controlled DVR," Jensen said. "You also now need to look at blending together TV Everywhere, VoD and network DVR functionality on a consistent user interface that allows a customer to do search and discovery and find the assets that they want."
Cisco introduced its Videoscape Unity platform at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, while Motorola touted its Medios platform in Las Vegas. Both can enable end-to-end nDVR services or can be used in a modular approach.
"The key is that we really have to drive complete services," Cisco's Clemson said.
"At Cisco, we think a network DVR service — where the idea is you can record from anywhere on your iPad, on your PC or on your set-top box, and then stream it anywhere — is a really compelling service."
BitTorrent Live P2P Broadcasting Protocol
Excerpted from ITNews Report by Juha Saarinen
Stream on.
The makers of the popular peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing protocol BitTorrent have made the company's live broadcast service available to everyone.
Designed to lower barriers of entry for broadcasters by lowering bandwidth and infrastructure costs through peers pooling network resources with each other, BitTorrent Live streams work better the more people that use it, the company claims.
BitTorrent founder and developer Bram Cohen says Live has demonstrated scalability and stability during the early trial phase and is now open to anyone who wants to use it.
So far, no large Internet broadcaster such as Netflix has come onboard with BitTorrent Live, which mainly displays music videos currently.
The streaming service has been in a closed beta trial with broadcasters since November last year and works in a similar fashion to the BitTorrent P2P file-sharing protocol.
It uses UDP for data transmission and encodes video in H.264 format with the AAC codec utilized for audio.
BitTorrent as a file-sharing protocol has courted controversy thanks to it being used to disseminate copyrighted material such as movies and music recordings.
YouTube Co-Founder Prepping Possible Rival
Excerpted from AdWeek Report by Tim Peterson
YouTube has had its share of competition over the years. Companies like Vimeo and DailyMotion (plus copyright lawsuits and crushing overhead costs) led Chad Hurley and the video-sharing site's co-founders to sell YouTube to Google. More recently Hulu and others have entered the fold. Soon Hurley, who left Google/YouTube in 2010, will launch a potential new rival.
"I wish South by Southwest (SXSW) was a month later because I could unveil the new product," Hurley said during a Q&A with Digg founder and Google Ventures partner Kevin Rose on Saturday afternoon. Without going into too much detail, he said the product is "primarily video based and gives flexibility for people to work together and create content."
Sounds like Hurley is talking about taking a second crack at creating a better YouTube. Rose asked whether that's indeed his intention. "We're not setting up to kill YouTube — now," Hurley said. He added, "There's always going to be a place for YouTube." His intention, instead, is to create a platform better suited for collaboration.
Beyond hinting at his latest aspirations, Hurley used the interview session to shed some light on how YouTube found its current place within Google, recalling how some of the key deal discussions took place at Denny's, just as Yahoo was looking to squeeze in on the deal.
"We met with Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin at Denny's in Redwood City to talk about the possibility of selling YouTube. We met there the week before with Yahoo's Jerry Yang and Terry Semel," he said, noting that Semel had suggested the locale because it was "very low-key and had great breakfast."
Despite Yahoo's culinary courtship, Hurley and his fellow co-founders went with Google. "Yahoo didn't necessarily step up the way Google did. We knew they were going to give us the support," Hurley said.
Redbox Instant Launches Movie Streaming
Excerpted from The Seattle Times Report by Michael White
Redbox Instant, the movie-streaming venture by Bellevue, WA based Coinstar and Verizon Communications, began commercial service Thursday, vying with Netflix and Amazon for online viewers.
The service concluded its testing and began offering sales, rentals, and subscription streaming of movies, Redbox Instant Chief Executive Shawn Strickland said. It had been testing with a limited number of customers.
"We think we've got a real strong market position for getting the titles faster than other services," Strickland said. "We'll grow from there."
The service, which combines streaming with discs available from kiosks, is focused on movies and aims to draw customers from competitors that don't offer physical rentals, Strickland said in January. A marketing campaign will start next week and the service will be available through Microsoft's Xbox console, Apple products and Web browsers, he said Thursday.
With its offering of downloads for sale, video-on-demand (VoD), streaming, and physical rentals, the Redbox business will be able to offer titles as they become available to competitors in those markets, and sometimes sooner in the case of DVD rentals, Strickland said. Redbox Instant's partners have identified a potential audience of as many as 35 million users.
Redbox Instant, at $8 to $9 a month, is counting on price and convenience to attract customers. Users will get unlimited streaming plus four DVDs a month from kiosks. The service also offers on-demand rentals and digital sales of newer titles.
"There's a core group of DVD lovers who really see the value," Strickland said. "They see the value of the four credits and the streaming looks like a very affordable add- on."
Redbox Instant will offer streaming titles from Time Warner's Warner Bros. and Epix, which includes movies from Viacom's Paramount, Lions Gate Entertainment, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios.
It also has an agreement with an aggregator that represents other major studios, Strickland said.
New Epix films will be available for rental and purchase at the same time they go to other VOD services. They will become available for streaming a few months later, but also at the same time Netflix and other streamers get them.
Films from Lions Gate, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, Sony Pictures and Relativity Media will be available for purchase and on-demand rental.
Ignite Technologies a Strong Performer in Video Platforms
Ignite Technologies, the leading enterprise content delivery platform provider, today announced that it has been recognized by Forrester Research, as a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave: Video Platforms for the Enterprise, Q1 2013 report.
The report ranked eight vendors against 23 criteria to compare how each vendor fulfills a criteria and where they stand in relation to each other to help functional department leaders and IT professionals select a solution that best fits their video publishing needs. The criteria were grouped into three high-level categories: Current Offering, Strategy and Market Presence.
"We believe this report will provide a valuable baseline to enable business users and IT professionals to select vendors to support their corporate video initiatives for town hall meetings, corporate communications, sales enablement, and HR on-boarding," said Jim Janicki, President and Chief Executive Officer at Ignite Technologies.
"We feel the recognition in this report supports Ignite's on-going efforts to offer a feature rich application on top of a software based delivery platform. In 2013, Ignite is planning to enhance its webcasting and direct video capture and content authoring tools to provide a more comprehensive solution."
Ignite Technologies is a leader in Enterprise Content Delivery solutions. Ignite's product suite includes live streaming and media portal solutions enabling employees to view content, live or on demand for corporate communications, training, field sales and marketing on desktops, smart-phones or tablets.
Ignite's patented peer-to-peer (P2P) delivery technology overcomes network and connectivity limitations. Ignite's Solution Suite is deployed around the globe at companies like Accenture, Bank of America and Flowserve.
Vimeo Adds Rentals, Downloads
Excerpted from AllThingsD Report by Peter Kafka
Vimeo is a much smaller video site than YouTube, so it tries to compete in other areas. It tends to emphasize videos that are artier and more ambitious than dogs on skateboards, for instance. And it has very few ads.
Newest selling point: It is giving video owners the ability to sell their work.
There are lots of places to buy or rent videos on the web, including YouTube, but here Vimeo is trying to stand out in a couple different ways: Its service is designed to let any kind of content owner — not just the big studios — hawk their stuff. And it is giving content owners a bigger cut of each sale.
Most video sites usually let content owners keep 70 percent of each sale, but Vimeo is offering 90 percent. The catch here is that the 90 percent comes after Vimeo handles credit card/PayPal fees, which means the real split will be something less than 90 percent.
So, what's the real number? That's going to vary a bit. But I asked Vimeo to sketch out the fees for a hypothetical $4.99 sale: They estimate transaction costs of $0.33 — 6.6 percent, which leaves $4.66 to split. If the owner takes 90 percent of that, it's $4.19, or 84 percent of the gross.
So here you go, David Carr and friends: If you want to sell or rent the gag reel from your SXSW presentation this weekend, instead of giving it away, you can do it!
Meantime, everyone else should watch this, because it's pretty great.
Video on Mobile Phones vs. Tablets
Excerpted from eMarketer Report
As the number of mobile video viewers continues its steady climb, it's becoming increasingly clear that not all users behave in the same way. One example of this can be found in a survey of mobile viewing behaviors conducted by the Rovi Corporation. When Rovi looked at how viewing behavior changed on mobile phones vs. tablets, striking differences emerged.
When asked what content they watched on mobile devices, phone and tablet viewers agreed on the big picture: The top three kinds of content for both users were movies, user-generated content (such as YouTube videos) and TV shows. But the difference lies in emphasis: Tablet viewers were much more likely than mobile phone viewers to prefer feature-length movies and TV shows. Mobile phone viewers were more likely to watch user-generated content.
In addition, mobile phone viewers were twice as likely to say they watched music videos on their devices as tablet viewers. By a slim margin, mobile phones were also the device of choice for news programming.
Even on smart-phones, there is more than one kind of mobile video viewer. A separate study conducted by Nielsen found that in 2012, US mobile viewers watched via both apps and the mobile web: 72% said they'd watched video by either method. Downloading clips directly to the smart-phone was a less popular option, although 42% said they'd done it.
The mobile web was a popular way to watch video in every country Nielsen studied. Only in South Korea did it fail to break 50% adoption among smart-phone video viewers, and even there just barely. Also notable, in India, downloading video clips was more popular than elsewhere: 57% had done so. Smart-phone apps, on the other hand, were a relatively unpopular way to watch.
The upswing in mobile viewing has not gone unnoticed by advertisers. According to Videology, mobile accounted for 5% of all US digital video ad impressions in Q4 2012.
Learn more.
The 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors of 2013
Excerpted from CRN Report by Jack McCarthy
In the coming months, the cloud will change businesses in ways we can't imagine.
Companies are rushing to develop new technologies to speed cloud development. Across the board, vendors young and old are offering new solutions that are making cloud computing easier, faster, more effective and less expensive.
The cloud is not new. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models promoted by Salesforce.com's on-demand CRM packages captured the attention of businesses years ago. Hosting centers have handled infrastructure needs. Virtualization, eliminating the need to keep hardware on-premise, has acted as a disrupter of traditional IT notions. Amazon formalized the cloud business model using its own infrastructure and opened the floodgates of the cloud era.
But cloud computing has now passed a tipping point, as business leaders recognize the benefits and are issuing orders to get into the cloud, fast.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), at first dominated by Amazon Web Services' automated public cloud model and followed by Rackspace and others using OpenStack, open-source standards, is now being offered to businesses in public, private, or hybrid models. The action in this space now centers on making it easy for enterprises to pick and choose what mixture of public and private infrastructure makes them feel comfortable.
Once businesses decide to adopt a cloud service infrastructure service, they look to a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider to help them transition and manage their IT resources as they move from their data center onto the cloud. This is a complex task and businesses such as RightScale, Heroku and Red Hat are stepping up with ever-more creative and useful solutions.
Salesforce.com may have started the SaaS revolution, but others quickly followed. Microsoft, Google, and other established vendors provide their signature software apps through the cloud. Many other newer firms are offering vertical solutions, such as financial reporting as well as testing, app development and more.
Off-premise hosting has created new needs for security that new and old vendors are rushing to fill. New security architectures are being created to protect enterprise resources that now reside in off-premise data centers that are being accessed by mobile devices. Whether it's a longtime storage leader such as Symantec or upstarts such as Bromium and CloudPassage, the race is on to build the cheapest and most effective solution.
The cloud has created a new world for storage, providing an almost inexhaustible repository for data. The category has seen new companies such as Box and DropBox rise up to offer low-cost cloud storage. Major cloud players Google and Amazon Web Services added storage to their cloud portfolios, while established players such as EMC pivot to the cloud.
Get a good seat and watch in the coming months as the cloud innovations come into view. Welcome to the Cloud 100.
Cloud Computing Is Slowly Winning the Trust War
Excerpted from Forbes Report by Louis Columbus
Seeing skeptical CIOs agree to cloud-based pilots of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and other applications is evidence of how cloud computing is slowly winning the trust war.
Further evidence can be seen from how skeptical many of these CIOs initially were, and how successful pilots led to their gradual trust.
This trust hasn't come cheap however.
Every one of these CIOs spoken with, across a range of manufacturing companies, learned that Service Level Agreements (SLAs) aren't sufficient to manage the areas of security, privacy, and confidentiality on their own. Cloud computing vendors have used SLAs as a means to imply security standards are met; one CIO told me he had an audit done to see if the SLA targets promised were realistic. They weren't and he moved on to another vendor. That is the level of skepticism and lack of trust many CIOs initially have about the cloud today.
Add to that how much Europe doesn't trust the cloud, and any CIO of a manufacturing or services business that has operations globally has ample reason to be skeptical about cloud computing. The highly visible failures of Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft continue to fuel skepticism and distrust of cloud computing as well.
Despite these factors, cloud computing is slowing winning the trust war. Here are the key take-aways from my conversations and visits with CIOs and their departments over the last two weeks:
Service Level Agreement (SLA) claims of security, privacy and confidentiality often only partially cover the unique needs of a given business — rarely all of them. CIOs complained that the SLAs they were initially given for cloud pilots by vendors lacked any insight into their core business, how it operated, and how the cloud-based applications could contribute greater insight and intelligence.
Only after several revisions and additions of performance measurements tied to business strategies did these skeptical CIOs let the pilots go on. Model contracts for defining privacy, for these CIOs, are also losing credibility. These CIOs forced the issue of a highly specific privacy plan from vendors and got them.
For global cloud deployments, CIOs viewed the development a roadmap and plan for how to deal with transborder data flow restrictions and in-country compliance for data confidentiality, security and personal information protection as critical. One manufacturing CIO is setting up a two-tier ERP system throughout Europe has to first define the global privacy regulations across each nation and province. Depending on the European nation this could include defining the physical location, contents and specific configuration of every server used. Germany has among the most intensive data protection rules and requirements, which further require intensive roadmap and plan development to stay in compliance.
The most skeptical CIOs run scenario tests of full data and record extractions during pilots. This is a safeguard in case the relationship with the cloud provider goes badly, and also to make sure they can quickly get their data back and avert vendor lock-in. As part of this many CIOs want to see proof that data deletion has worked correctly on the provider's servers.
The most trustworthy cloud computing pilots quickly move beyond basic analytics including ROI to deliver expertise and knowledge specific to the clients' business. This is the most powerful dynamic of all in the victories cloud computing is having in the trust war. When a cloud pilot moves beyond showing how it can automate a process — say payroll for example — and starts making contributions to the expertise and knowledge of a company, trust grows quickly. At that point trust becomes an accelerator for cloud computing and the platform and applications become part of the IT strategy of a business.
Bottom Line: Trust is the greatest accelerator there is in cloud computing's growing adoption, and that's earned when cloud applications get beyond simple metrics to delivering insights and useful intelligence on secured platforms.
Coming Events of Interest
2013 NAB Show - April 4th-11th in Las Vegas, NV. Every industry employs audio and video to communicate, educate and entertain. They all come together at NAB Show for creative inspiration and next-generation technologies to help breathe new life into their content. NAB Show is a must-attend event if you want to future-proof your career and your business.
CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE at NAB Show - April 8th-9th in Las Vegas, NV.The New ways cloud-based solutions have accomplished better reliability and security for content distribution. From collaboration and post-production to storage, delivery, and analytics, decision makers responsible for accomplishing their content-related missions will find this a must-attend event.
Digital Hollywood Spring - April 29th-May 2nd in Marina Del Rey, CA. The premier entertainment and technology conference. The conference where everything you do, everything you say, everything you see means business.
CLOUD COMPUTING EAST 2013 - May 19th-21st in Boston, MA. CCE:2013 will focus on three major sectors, GOVERNMENT, HEALTHCARE, and FINANCIAL SERVICES, whose use of cloud-based technologies is revolutionizing business processes, increasing efficiency and streamlining costs.
P2P 2013: IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing - September 9th-11th in Trento, Italy. The IEEE P2P Conference is a forum to present and discuss all aspects of mostly decentralized, large-scale distributed systems and applications. This forum furthers the state-of-the-art in the design and analysis of large-scale distributed applications and systems.
CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2013 — October 27th-29th in Las Vegas, NV. Three conference tracks will zero in on the latest advances in applying cloud-based solutions to all aspects of high-value entertainment content production, storage, and delivery; the impact of cloud services on broadband network management and economics; and evaluating and investing in cloud computing services providers.
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