VBrick Eyes Live, Practical Streaming With VBoss

"Everything else requires you to source something elsewhere," he said. "It’s truly the only complete service, and I think it’s also the simplest because of the VBrick appliance. You’ll never have an encoder. The last thing you want in a live event is for the encoder to crash, and that’s not possible with a VBrick."

Those who subscribe to VBoss will receive the VBrick encoder in the mail and can then set up their portal with a web-based tool, which allows users to decide whether they would like advertisements to be displayed on their landing pages and whether they would like to make their videos available on a pay-per-view basis. Users purchase bandwidth on a "gas tank model," Mavrogeanes said, meaning they will pay for a certain amount of users and bandwidth in advance and can purchase more when that amount is used up.

"That’s much better than the traditional CDN model of, ‘OK, you’re going to make this commitment,’ and then you have overage charges, and you really can’t predict what’s going to happen," he said. "This is more like what publishers and consumers expect. It’s a little easier for people to understand how it’s priced."

Partnerships
Mavrogeanes said VBrick has partnered with several CDN providers, most notably Akamai, to provide bandwidth to VBoss users. Akamai’s Stream OS service will be used for large, bandwidth-intensive events while other services, including PowerStream, will be used for smaller streams.

"If the video distribution was intended to be very, very high, like a million viewers, we would put you on an Akamai backbone, for example," Mavrogeanes said. "If it were fewer viewers, we’d put you on a different backbone, a different CDN. So, we have multiple CDNs that we work with to provision the service depending upon your needs."

VBrick has also partnered with Microsoft for its Silverlight user interface, which will power VBoss. Mavrogeanes said Silverlight will give VBoss the platform independence needed "so we operate the same way on a Windows machine as we do on a Mac, Power PC, Intel, Safari, IE [Internet Explorer], Firefox."

How to Get It
VBoss was unveiled at this year’s National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference. It will be made available to new customers in June and will cost $2,500 and up depending on the level of service purchased. More information is available at www.vbrick.com.

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