An Authoring Environment Of Their Own

Last year, the Media Solutions Group billed its internal HP customers for more than $10 million in services. But it may find clients in the outside world a tougher sell than its in-house cousins. For one thing, the Media Solutions charter will now be to make a profit, not just cover costs, which will likely translate into higher prices. To avoid the fate of Intel's Media Services Group, which recently folded after a brief few months in the marketplace, Media Solutions may have to prove its services can translate to positive ROI.

Plenty of media services organizations offer video production facilities, post-production suites, encoders and streaming servers. Besides the Hewlett-Packard name and reputation - formidable marketing assets in and of themselves - the Media Solutions Group hopes to differentiate itself by sharing its own customized hardware and authoring software with its external clients. Media Solutions is particularly proud of its DeskTV Authoring Environment application.

Until recently, streaming multimedia authoring - the integration of streaming video, slides, text and other graphical elements - has been labor intensive, and the exclusive domain of programmers familiar with script commands or SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language). Companies with sufficient resources have developed their own authoring tools to simplify the process. Microsoft, for example, created its Microsoft Interactive Training Tool to automate its own in-house authoring process, and plans to release a commercial iteration - the Windows Media Producer - later this year. (See the April issue of Streaming Media Magazine).

HP's version - the DeskTV Authoring Environment - enables non-programmers to create sophisticated live and on-demand presentations for both the Windows Media and Real platforms. One of DeskTV's most innovative features is "SmartCache," which automatically determines the size of a slide and how long it will take to load at various bit rates, and then caches the slide in the background while the presentation runs. This enables presentations to utilize rapid slide-flips.

DeskTV offers a number of other useful features. For example, authors can create time code markers for slide-flips with a single click while watching an on-demand presentation (the slide-flip time code can be subsequently edited). Global timeline shifting allows all slide-flip times to be shifted simultaneously. Web player templates - with windows for video, slides and text - can be customized and saved. Graphic titles are generated within the application, making for simplified title creation and editing. And a table of contents - with hyperlinks to specific locations in a streaming video - can be generated automatically.

By automatically determining how much free disk space is on each server, DeskTV can also automate the publishing process. Craig Barnes, Web/multimedia project manager for Media Solutions and a key developer of DeskTV, notes, "All of the files related to the presentation - whether it be live or on-demand - get pushed to the streaming servers and Web servers involved. Then [the application] says, ‘Here's the URL to give to the client.' So you don't even have to move the files anywhere when you're done."

Live DeskTV webcasts can be simultaneously recorded - including slide-flip time codes - for quick conversion to on-demand presentations. "It used to be about a day or two turnaround for a live event to be put on-demand," says Barnes. "Now, if it takes an hour, that's a slow one." Lachtanski adds, "[DeskTV] has allowed us to handle the dramatic increase in customers without increasing our head count."

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