Media Show report: Simpler technology means empowered user generated content

Attendees getting a demo at SME 2009

Streaming Media East 2009 was an exciting show with over 3400 participants and over 50 vendors represented on the exhibit floor. There were several recurring themes this year, all of them trending toward providing easier to use products for content creation, content management and content distribution.

 

The trend toward ease of use supports a democratization of technology, enabling anyone to create and distribute multimedia content and making it easier for large organizations to support infrastructures. This is in synch with Web 2.0 philosophies of putting “the social” in social networking and provisioning user generated content.

 

Digital media, including streaming video, has been the traditional purview of audio/video technical specialists. In the past producers of content needed to be able to encode the video, combine video & audio with other content (like PowerPoint, surveys, polls, collateral documents,  pdf’s, etc.) and provision the distribution to content delivery networks. This required a variety of skill sets not available to the average subject matter expert. If an expert wanted to produce a multi media message to share their insights with an audience, they required the help of an expert in the technology.

 

The vendors at SME all spoke to the introduction of easy to use creation software tools. This enables user generated content in a way not available in the past. And the timing is perfect because there is a strong demand for good content.

 

Interactive Video Technologies offers their Studio product. This is a self service content creation tool. It has been enabled recently with the latest versions of Flash from Adobe. The new revisions of Flash do several things to improve the process. One, Flash video doesn’t require encoding, and two, Adobe made  a Flash version of PowerPoint available. In the past the video would have to be encoded and the slides go through format conversion. This means a subject matter expert can now sit in front of their computer and web cam, talk into the camera while advancing slides and immediately publish the content for a viewing community. Greg Pulier, the Chief Technology Officer at IVT, sees the future of webcasting including “unified platforms for employees to create, share and consume rich media, making it trivial to record with PowerPoint and share with selected groups”.

 

Qumu, another vendor of content creation tools, typically has its products installed behind the firewall in enterprise deployments at big companies. They too have just introduced a desktop tool, Qumu Kodiak; however they rely on the Windows Media format. Not a surprise as Qumu has a product suite that is tightly integrated with Microsoft’s Silverlight.

Other content creation vendors are leaning toward the use of appliances. Sonic Foundry’s MediaSite, widely installed at educational institution classrooms and corporate boardrooms, uses a simple device with a start and stop button. This enables user generated content get created for a viewing audience. The instructor (or speaker) can upload their slides, look into the camera and start recording their lecture. They press the stop button and the webcast is ready for distribution. There are no pre production or post production processes. The appliance performs all the encoding and transformation steps.

 

LiveU has an interesting device, currently used by broadcasters and newspapers but eventually available to the consumer, that uses multiple wireless connections to connect to the internet. Using Sprint, Verizon and AT&T cellular modems, augmented by wifi, the device aggregates the bandwidth and includes an on board encoding technology. This means a video stream can be fired up in a remote location and uploaded live to a viewing community. It is used by Gannet, Skynews, NBC.com and others. With LiveU, a reporter can get to a site and broadcast live without the use of an expensive (and large) satellite truck.

 

Streaming Media East brought content creation technology vendors face to face with streaming video users. Responding to new demands for User Generated Content, and taking advantage of improvements in the available technology, these vendors are enabling content creators with easy to use, friendly tools. This is bound to support a proliferation of new content for communities to share.

 

Tomorrow, more insights into the offerings for content management and delivery.