Streaming Media's Gear of the Year, 2013-14

Tim Siglin's Picks

Joby GripTight Mount

Joby’s compact GripTight Mount (below) is by far the least expensive, lightest, and smallest piece of kit I’ve selected for this year’s Gear of the Year. But I can honestly say that it’s one that I reach for very frequently; it's become an indispensable tool for various production tasks.

Joby is known for making more famous products like the GorillaPod, a flexible wraparound tripod used by our team to hang cameras in locations as exotic as a meeting room at the House of Commons or Jose Castillo’s spicy and productive SparkPlaza. Yet it turns out that the included GripTight Mount (known formally as the Joby JM1-01WW GripTight Mount) has proven an even more versatile production tool.

By itself, the GripTight Mount lists for $19.95, although you can buy one on Amazon for just over $14 or with a GorillaPod for about $26. The GripTight fits on any standard tripod or monopod head, or acts as its own standalone tabletop mount for a variety of smartphones, snugly holding any iPod touch or iPhone (as well as a variety of Android and WindowsPhone devices) in place for the duration of a shoot.

The GripTight Mount measures just over three inches long when collapsed, and only 0.3" thick; as the pinchers at either end of the GripTight Mount fold inwards to create a flat, thin surace. This means I can easily slip it into my front jeans pocket, as it takes up little more space than an extra-long USB flash drive, alongside my iPhone.

In the field—especially if I’m hiking to a shoot location—I’ve paired the GripTight Mount with a ProMaster MP528 carbon-fiber monopod so that I have a monopod doing double duty as a lightweight hiking stick. The Joby’s snug grip on the iPhone allows me to hoist the monopod over dropoffs with no fear that my iPhone will slip out and spend the rest of its days at the bottom of an inaccessible cliff—although I will admit to using my iPod touch to shoot in some situations where losing my cell phone might prove detrimental, so as not to tempt fate.

In less arduous situations, where a flat surface is handy, I forgo the use of either the GorillaPod or the monopod, opting to use the Joby GripTight as a self-balancing tabletop smartphone stabilizer. Either way this little wonder easily tops my Gear of the Year list.

Promise Pegasus R6

By the time you read this article, Promise Technologies will be shipping the updated version of this desktop-based RAID 5 Thunderbolt storage solution. The new unit will have Thunderbolt 2 connectors, allowing 20 Gbps bi-directional transfer, compared to 10 Gbps first-generation Thunderbolt connectors found on a majority of products today.

But having worked with the original Promise Pegasus R6 for more than 18 months, I can say that even the first-generation version of this six-drive RAID solution is an incredibly robust and intuitive storage workhorse. And it’s very fast, even when compared to many solid-state-drive (SSD) devices I've attached it to.

The R6 that I use contains six 2GB drives, for a total of 12GB of storage, in the N+1 configuration common to RAID 5 storage devices. It lists for $2,495, although it can be found for just over $2,100 in a variety of locations.

The enclosure houses six drives and has two Thunderbolt connections, so that multiple enclosures—or a 27" Z27i monitor, in our case—can be daisychained together.

Each of the six hot-swappable drive bays is equipped with a two-light status indicator, as well as a two-color power button. After more than 16 months of continual use, one of the drive bay lights on my unit shifted from blue to red, warning me that I might need to check the status of the enclosure.

Using the included Promise Pegasus utility, I discovered that the drive had failed. Had it not been for the indicator light, I would never have sensed a potential data loss scenario looming, because even with the single failed drive, I was still able to achieve 423 Megabytes per second (MB/sec) writes and 353 MB/sec reads.

A simple RMA with Hitachi, maker of the drives in my R6 enclosure, resulted in a replacement drive arriving in a very timely manner, after which the Promise utility rebuilt the entire R6 RAID, allowing me to once again go back to writes of 666 MB/sec and reads of 553MB/sec.

What could have turned into a significant data loss disaster turned out to be merely a small hiccup in production, thanks to the foresight Promise put into making this “luggable” and lovable RAID 5, 6-bay storage solution easy to work with and to repair.

Apple TV (AirPlay)

Apple, the maker of the highly popular iPad, iPhone, and Macintosh computers, has a hobby: the Apple TV (below).

Or at least that's the way Steve Jobs famously referred to the first-generation product. The more recent, third-generation Apple TV is about one-third the size of the original unit, and packs a single-core A5 processor, HDMI output, and a 100 Mbps Ethernet port. In addition, the 4-inch square unit, which sells for around $99, has WiFi, which can be used in production to display content from myriad Apple devices.

This wireless display capability, known as AirPlay, allows a Macbook, iPad, iPhone, or late-model iPod touch to stream its audio and/or video source directly to the Apple TV, for display on an attached big-screen monitor.

For presentations this is a handy feature, allowing multiple users to show videos, Keynote presentations, or even webpages to a larger audience.

Unfortunately, the Apple TV doesn’t have a lockout mode yet, which has led to a few overzealous souls’ “accidentally” pushing their content to the big screen while someone else is presenting, and the lack of distinction between multiple Apple TVs on the same network can sometimes lead to confusion as to which device will display a presenter’s content.

Still, for ease of use the Apple TV tops the list. I carry one while I’m on the road, as I’ve found it a much better solution for connecting to a hotel room’s flat panel television. The Apple TV takes us less space than the 10-foot HDMI cable I used to carry, and I’m free to roam around the room with my 11" MacBook Air, unencumbered by wires, using the Apple TV only when I need to view something on the larger monitor.

In a pinch, if the venue doesn’t have WiFi, I can use my laptop to generate a WiFi access point, limiting the connectivity to the specific MAC address of the Apple TV. On the flip side, if I’m in a hotel room that has an Ethernet jack, I can also use the Apple TV for its original purpose: watching Netflix or iTunes cloud-based content.

The Apple TV: a versatile production tool in a very small package.

Wowza nDVR

I’ve written about network-based DVRs before, including how they can dramatically limit power consumption (to the tune of $50 per household per year in power savings) if implemented properly.

But what if you’re just doing a one-off webcast? Is there any benefit to using nDVR? The answer is yes, as illustrated by the nDVR functionality in Wowza Streaming Engine’s (below) AddOn nDVR tool.

I design nDVR functionality into customer solutions for enterprise and house-of-worship clients; it allows those stragglers who might miss the beginning of a live event to view the content on a few-minute offset rather than having to wait until the entire webcast is completed.

We build our system solutions so that our tardy viewers can choose to start viewing at the beginning of a live event (using nDVR) or at the current time in the event (using the live stream). For those who use nDVR, they can even push ahead in the time-delayed stream to catch up with the currently live portion. This might allow a road-warrior employee to catch up on key points in the CEO’s all-hands meeting, or allow two churches to coordinate their sermons and music ministries.

Either way, the addition of Wowza nDVR to the standard media server functionality can be accomplished via a perpetual license or a per-use /per-month basis. Once the nDVR has begun recording the content, it can hold it for a defined number of rotating hours, making the idea of a rebroadcast a fairly simple process for those who might want to watch the content a bit later in the day. In that way, an nDVR performs like a simple content management system for content that may be timely for only a few hours.

With the imminent arrival of Wowza Media Server 4.0, we look forward to seeing what additional enhancements Wowza adds to the new nDVR AddOn.