Streaming Media East 2007: Emphasis on the Enterprise

Accordent Engage
Anyone who’s worked with third-party webconferencing vendors to put together a presentation that includes several speakers, a few slide decks, interactive Q&A, and hundreds of viewers knows just what a pricey endeavor that can be. Acordent’s new Engage offers all of the functionality of those third-party vendors’ solutions, but lets enterprise users keep the entire process in-house. That should save both money and time, as virtually anyone within an organization with a telephone and an internet connection can initiate and deliver rich-media web presentations from their desktops.

"Video has been viewed as an important, but secondary type of communication within the enterprise," says Accordent’s Newman. "We’re looking to make it a primary form of communication." Accordent will license the Engage software, which features a fully customizable user interface, based upon the number of speakers that an enterprise wants to be able to use it, going up in increments of four inputs, which is the capacity of the audio encoder that Engage uses.

Those speakers upload their presentations, initiate a phone call, and then audience members log in using various levels of password protection to listen to and view the presentation on their desktops or laptops. Newman claims the number of audience members is limited "only by the enterprise’s own infrastructure." Upon completion, the presentation can be archived almost instantly for on-demand viewing.

adap.tv Partners with thePlatform
As everyone knows, the name of the game in online video advertising is targeting and reporting. adap.tv announced that it has partnered with thePlatform to allow users of that company’s video management and publishing services to "place relevant, viewer-friendly ads in real time," according to a press release. The company claims that its algorithms analyze video content and determine the most relevant ads, which are then inserted as text and graphics overlays inside the video window, creating a solution that is both targeted and—perhaps equally important—relatively non-intrusive.

Kulabyte Announces HD Solution for On2’s VP6
We’re still a long way from the day when high-definition video is the rule rather than the exception, but relative upstart Kulabyte’s announcement brings HD into the Flash mix. The company emphasizes the speed of it encoding—it demonstrated 1080p progressive Flash encoding at 42.2 frames per second at NAB—something that Adobe’s Chris Hock says will give users an advantage in time-to-market for getting HD Flash content online. The Kulabyte Professional VP6 Encoder will begin shipping in June.