Why not do this online?

By Christine Perey
Network World, 05/14/01

How we did it | Flipping for FlipFactory

During the development of FlipFactory, Telestream offered the full beta software capabilities on the Web as a hosted application free of charge (a trial account is still available from the Telestream site but some limitations exist). Media and entertainment producers tested the software service and provided valuable feedback.

While the price was much more attractive than the personal encoding alternatives (which run between $400 and $2,500 per seat, depending on the hardware and software configuration), everyone knew that this business model was not sustainable. GigaFlip, as the hosted service was called, is now the online FlipFactory demo site. If you want to use the online version of the software hosted by Telestream, you have to deal with a little bug logo digitally "watermarked" into every frame of the video. Otherwise, it delivers the same easy user experience and results as its server-based cousin.

Other vendors are offering commercial service alternatives. For instance, two of Telestream's partners, Atlanta-based Pathfire and Belgium-based Digital Media Facilities (DMF), extended their media services portfolios to include FlipFactory-based encoding and transcoding to their broadcast television studio customers. MediaNet, DMF's virtual private network for Belgium's broadcast and production community, offers a range of services, including bit rate and format transcoding, over its ATM backbone. Pathfire's VideoCenter, an online media management and syndication portal, can accept a customer's live or previously recorded Webcast stream in one format over a high-speed network connection and deliver it in different formats and bit rates to any server designated as a destination (private network or Internet).

Although Pathfire's management says the company plans to expand from its current base in broadcast and cable industries into radio, digital cinema, syndication and streaming content on the Internet, neither of the service providers currently offering FlipFactory-based services are targeting an enterprise customer base with corporate applications.

Currently, either an enterprise media manager or a service bureau's personnel transcode media on a personal production workstation. In a time when corporations are closely controlling expenses and focusing on their core competencies, high-volume corporate media producers we spoke with indicated interest in having customer-initiated transcoding of their in-house captured digital content be part of the application hosting and delivery network's services. As part of our study we asked three independent media service businesses why a simple "self-serve" virtual encoding service bureau such as one enabled by FlipFactory Publish is not available commercially for corporate customers.

The most obvious reason is that it would likely interfere with existing business models in which analog video tape in Beta or VHS format is sent to an encoding service bureau for digitization (also called capture) and subsequent compression into the customer's choice of formats. Following encoding, the service provider can easily up-sell the customer hosting services, application services to wrap around the videostream, and even charge for streaming video or audio files to customer-specified audiences.

Theoretically, when media production resource bottlenecks are identified and reduced, along with associated costs, video communications will be more pervasive. Greater volumes of content would, in turn, drive storage and media asset management revenues.

Jim Baker, vice president of Media 100's service subsidiary, examined the possibilities of automating digital media conversion services and discussed them with existing encoding clients. Baker says he sees two obstacles. First, more than half of corporate customers lack the equipment and expertise to satisfactorily digitize their media. "They just want to Federal Express out tapes or an audio CD and know that they'll have files on a streaming server as soon as possible, no excuses," Baker says. "The second issue has to do with bandwidth. Even when a customer has the means in-house to digitize and convert assets to an interim format such as MPEG1 or MPEG2 or Motion JPEG, the resulting file is very large. It would take an unreasonable amount of time or bandwidth to upload [the new file] to a service provider's server. In addition to cost, the lack of reliability during large file transfers over the Internet would probably end in an unacceptably high rate of failure."

Baker and others that offer hosting services say the step before commercial automated transcoding services is a portal to which customers can easily, reliably and inexpensively post files they have encoded internally (on personal encoding stations) to their accounts on the host network. Today, content delivery network companies such as Digital Island and Akamai offer Web-based account management, including uploading files to the network. However, low-cost, automated content transcoding is not available on the menu of do-it-yourself options.

Martin Tobias, president and founder of Loudeye (formerly encoding.com) recalls MediaUpgrade.com, the service his company developed nearly three years ago to perform precisely the tasks enabled by FlipFactory Publish. "We were well ahead of our time," Tobias says. "Buyers didn't perceive us as solving a problem they were suffering from." Most likely the volume of media being produced were minuscule compared with today's production.

Finally, some experts contend that one of the premises on which FlipFactory is based - that transcoding to multiple formats or data rates is a necessary step in the streaming media workflow - is flawed. Generic Media proposes that there is a different response to client requests that will produce experiences as good as if files were pre-encoded and waiting to stream to audiences. "We wait until a request for a specific asset is received," says David Frederick, product manager at Generic Media's Publishing Service. "Then we respond very quickly with an appropriately generated file. First, this avoids creation and storage of files in data formats and rates that are not requested. We want to store for our customers the highest-possible quality streaming master. Secondly, since Generic Media Publishing Service is format- and data-rate-neutral, it can take advantage of new technologies more quickly than in-house solutions. Today, we output and stream video from 20K bit/sec or lower, up to 1.5M or 2M bit/sec, up to the data rate of the streaming master, in Real, WMT or QuickTime. All of this from a single URL on an HTML page."

For a discussion between Generic Media's vice president of engineering and Telestream's vice president of marketing, click here.