2007 Editors' Picks

Sorenson Squeeze 4.5
"If you produce streaming video," wrote contributing editor Jan Ozer in his StreamingMedia.com review, "Squeeze 4.5 is a product you need to download and try, even if you’re completely satisfied with your current workflow and encoding tools." What makes it a must-have? Blazing speed, batch-transcoding to multiple formats and multiple encoding parameters, and the output quality, which beats that of QuickTime Pro or the Windows Media Encoder for their own formats and nearly matches that of On2’s Flix Pro for Flash.

Veotag
"Deep tagging" is right up at the top of any online video fanatic’s wish list, and "Veotagging" is the best deep tagging tool available. Content publishers can upload their content into the Veotag player, embed that player into their sites, and tag any given video with as many clickable text phrases as are necessary to let viewers jump to exactly the point in the video they want to watch. Sure, it requires manual labor to enter the tags, but the results are well worth it, for both enterprise and entertainment publishers. My Mets fan buddies are currently fixated on the precise moment where the ball rolled through Bill Buckner’s legs in the 1986 World Series, but surely there are more, uh, practical applications.

Wowza Media Server
The two biggest drawbacks to Flash Video are its lack of DRM and the cost of the Adobe Flash Media Server. We’re still waiting on a solution to the former, but Wowza Media went a long way towards solving the latter with the Wowza Media Server, which it introduced in late 2006. It’s still in beta, but the word from those beta testers is nothing but positive. "Wowza addresses the most significant challenge our clients and we as a developer of Flash media solutions for Fortune 500 companies are facing: the poor economics of Flash streaming," writes Streaming Media reader Alan Caldwell of the consulting firm The SoftShop. "We find that with [Wowza’s] superior performance, flexibility, and features, Flash streaming can now effectively compete with Windows Media." ’Nuff said.