Haivision Talks Akamai Partnership, Varieties of Live Encoding
[Note: This sponsored interview was recorded at Streaming Media East 2013.]
One of the most active companies on the show floor at this year's Streaming Media East conference in New York City was Haivision, which was showing its Video Content Management System product line, Video Cloud solution (introduced at NAB), and Viper encoding appliance. During the show, Chance Mason, Haivision's EVP for internet media found time for a red carpet interview. One of the things he discussed was Haivision's tight relationship with Akamai for live events.
"We work very closely with Akamai," Mason said. "A lot of our encoders that are deployed, over 20,000 in the field primarily focus on live events and the creation of live content. So we needed a CDN that understood the value of live content and the importance of live content that had the ingress points throughout the world to where we could quickly enable our customers to broadcast their content outside the firewall with a reliable CDN. So we have a great relationship with Akamai."
Live video is huge in 2013 and Haivision is well positioned to take advantage of that. Mason spoke about Haivision's live encoding options.
"We were first to market with a live transcoder," Mason noted. "We have three flavors of the live transcoder: One, pay-as-you-go; two, managed services where Haivision will actually deploy the transcoders for you and manage them on your behalf; and three, actually license the software and spin it up in your own environment, which is very attractive to teleports or any organizations that are aggregating content or bringing content into a central location."
For more about Haivision's lineup and abilities, watch the full interview below.
Tim: Welcome back to the Streaming Media Producer Streaming Media 2013 red carpet interviews. We’ve got a great representative here from Haivision. And I’d like Chance to tell a little bit about himself and then we’ll start into what Haivision’s doing.
Chance: So my name is Chance Mason. I’m the executive vice president of internet media for Haivision. I joined Haivision after being in the industry for 12 years to expand the ecosystem of the product offering that we have at Haivision.
Tim: So what is Haivision doing these days?
Chance: Yeah. Haivision has been around almost 10 years and has over 20,000 encoders installed in the field managing low latency, high quality video distribution for enterprises, house of worship, medical institutions, etc.
Tim: Okay. And you recently came out with a new version of the Makito product line, if I remember correctly, the X2.
Chance: Yep, the X2 basically allows us to give twice the density for half the bandwidth. And so again it just continues to progress our codec.
Tim: You mentioned several market verticals, houses of worship, medical and like that, what would be kind of the core product line that would go into say a medical installation?
Chance: So the medical institutions leverage our encoders for distribution, right. So to give you an example of a medical, there may be surgery, an OR room that actually wants to take that content and broadcast it inside the firewall, as well as outside the firewall to individuals to watch that content. So they’ll leverage our encoders for that.
Tim: Okay, very good. And one of the things that I’ve heard mention of is a partnership or a solution alliance with Akamai. Can you talk a little bit about that.
Chance: Yeah, we work very closely with Akamai. A lot of our encoders that are deployed, over 20,000 in the field primarily focus on live events and the creation of live content. So we needed CDN that understood the value of live content and the importance of live content that had the ingress points throughout the world to where we could quickly enable our customers to broadcast their content outside the firewall with a reliable CDN. So we have a great relationship with Akamai.
Tim: So it’s Akamai points of presence that can do ingest at those points as well as obviously loading onto the core network.
Chance: Exactly.
Tim: Okay. What are you showing on the show floor here at Streaming Media East?
Chance: Well, we’re showing a broad range of our product lines, so we’re showing our Haivsion Video Cloud solution, which we rolled out at NAB this year. Which is essentially taking Haivision from behind the firewall company to an outside the firewall company. So we’re showing the product line of our VCMS, which is our Video Content Management System, many times categorized as an OVP. We’re showing our site builder, which is a content management system that allows people to easily deploy rich media video portals. And then we’re also showcasing our Viper, which is one of our most popular encoding technologies.
Tim: And if I remember correctly, the Viper is the one that has the multiple inputs, but also has some of the video furnace software.
Chance: It does. It’s basically taking the best of breed that we’ve developed for the different encoders that we have in the field and put it in a single compliance, so it has video furnace. It has the Makito, etc, all in one box. So it’s definitely a very valuable encoder for the field.
Tim: Interesting. So you mentioned trends coding as one of the things that you were talking about. Tell me a little bit about that. Are you hardware based transcoder or software based transcoder.
Chance: Yeah, we’re a software based transcoder. So a year ago we launched what we called HyperStream Live, which is essentially -- we believed we were a little early to the market. So we launched a pay-as-you-go solution that allowed people to test the solution. And we used the core fundamentals in core technology that we developed with Kulabyte and launched that as a software solution for transcoding. Again, we were first to market with a live transcoder. We have three flavors of the live transcoder: One, pay-as-you-go; two, managed services where Haivision will actually deploy the transcoders for you and manage them on your behalf; and three, actually license the software and spin it up in your own environment, which is very attractive to teleports or any organizations that are aggregating content or bringing content into a central location.
Tim: Interesting. Anything else you want the audience who is going to be watching this to know?
Chance: Yeah. I think that Haivision’s been perceived as a behind-the-firewall encoding company. I think if you have the opportunity visit www.haivision.com. Look at the Haivision Video Cloud and what we’ve recently deployed with our live transcoding solutions, which we were first to market with. It’s got over a year of tried and true testing and some of the biggest brands in the market leverage our live transcoding engine. And then also take a look at our VCMS, which allows you to ingest your assets, file based transcoding, asset management, but a very flexible workflow associated with it as well. It’s not a typical OVP that’s very tutorial where the one, two, three, four step. It actually gives you the ability to create an enterprise workflow inside the VCMS.
Tim: Nice. Chance thank you for being with us today. Those of you who are watching this on Streaming Media.com, you’ll actually find a brief write up of the interview as well.
This article is Sponsored Content
Related Articles
The first commercial implementations of Haivision's HEVC encoding allied with the company's Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) protocol, are due in the new year
13 Nov 2013
Chance Mason, Executive Vice President Internet Media Division of Haivision, says creating valuable user experiences will be the focus of 2013.
05 Dec 2012
Think cloud encoding is a chore? Think again. With Haivision the process of generating and distributing multiple encodes is a breeze.
13 Jul 2012
Companies and Suppliers Mentioned