by clark on September 21, 2010, under Clients, Devices, Features, Mobile
The notion of enhanced E Books has been around for years, but it is the proliferation of E Book readers, and more specifically tablet devices like the iPad and the unreleased Samsung Galaxy Tab that will truly transform the way some people view, consume and read books. Many may ask what the heck an enhanced E Book is. The definition is still being worked out in the publishing industry, and the formats are certainly far from being defined. But the premise is simple: include additional links, data, video, audio, or even software to “enhance” a book above and beyond the typical text you would see on the screen.
So curling up with a good book in bed can also include all kinds of extras if and when you want: an audio track of the author reading the prose, movie trailers, videos of book critics or additional explanations, links to related articles, games or contests, or even promotions for book signings or giveaways. Some might find it sad that we as a society want to merge a good book with mass media, but I find it very exciting. And I do believe that it will eventually lead to more book sales, can actually spur people to read more by making it a little more fun, and will certainly assist with the dissemination of information.
Devices like the Kindle and Nook do enable some enhanced features to be added to E Books, but the real game changers are the highly successful Apple iPad and all of the new tablets based on the Android platform set to be hitting retailers over the next 12 months. These devices can really bring all of these other enhancements to life and provide a broadband connection for the ease of serving media elements.
The current trend is for the publishers to develop an app for the enhanced E Book, and the app will be device specific (iPhone, iPad, Galaxy Tab, etc). Of course this adds to the complexity and cost for publishers. As more and more of these devices hit the market, decisions will have to be made to determine what apps they will provide and what devices they will support. Standardization will be difficult as each device will have it’s own specs and SDK.
Enhanced E Book apps can be very large in size as well if a great deal of video or audio is embedded in the app. The market will trend in the future to try to limit the size of the apps for both magazine and E Book apps. The hard drives on tablets are not very large and really are not designed to hold vast amounts of data. Some of the apps for magazines and E Books I have seen recently are over 1GB in size. Think about it….that means that if I have a 16GB iPad, I could only have 16 books or magazines on it at a time! It will be imperative that publishers think about this as they are developing their E Book Apps. Embedding large video or audio files in the apps will not be sustainable over time. Utilizing a media publishing platform like Castfire can enable these apps to serve media content to the Enhanced E Books and can publish audio or video to the multiple different devices you are targeting. These apps should be designed so that as much data as possible is coming from the cloud so that the file size is minimized.
Publishers really seem to be rushing to develop and nurture the enhanced E Book market right now. I don’t think anyone knows what they will look like even in the next 12 months, but I know that I’m excited to read, listen and watch them as they rapidly come to market.
by clark on September 10, 2010, under Devices, Mobile
I just took a recent flight and was shocked by the number of people I saw toting their iPads. What struck me wasn’t just the number of iPads I saw, but what many people were doing with them — watching video. The individual right next to me was actually streaming a Netflix movie on-demand. This would have been impossible a short time ago, but the mobile web is truly becoming a reality.
With the $37 Million Row 44 just raised coupled with the deep pockets of Aircell (GoGo Inflight Internet) more and more airlines will be outfitted with WiFi. Most major carriers have installed service on key flight segments, and Southwest just announced every plane will have WiFi soon. Each airline seems to have very different pricing models for what they charge however. The flight I was just on (Alaska Airlines) was only $5 for a domestic flight using the GoGo service, and I hope that most carriers will follow suit. At that price it is just a no-brainer to turn on any device you have and enable the WiFi. It just opens up the doors to productivity and entertainment. I wouldn’t be surprised if some were streaming movies on their Android or iPhones for such a low entry point.
Thank you FCC for approving WiFi in the air….improving our lives and entertainment one mobile connection at a time.
by Brian Walsh on September 8, 2010, under Clients, Development, Devices, Features, HTML5, Mobile
In June of 2009, Apple introduced a new video format that provides adaptive bitrate over http. If those words don’t sound like they should go together – or in that order – don’t worry. It’s actually not as complex as it sounds and is a really cool technology.
Adaptive bitrate allows the quality of the video to adjust depending on your internet connection speed. The faster the connection, the better quality the video will be. While it has been executed in a number of ways on the desktop, this is the first implementation for mobile devices. Additionally, the implementation uses a standard http connection – a very basic building block of the internet. This protocol is very easy to scale and requires no additional software.
While the adaptive bitrate does have advantages, there are three specific disadvantages for publishers:
Castfire utilizes a custom transcoding engine and queue that distributes the work across many different processors and servers. We are able to quickly divide the workload across available machines to process as quickly as possible. The queue enables each client and output profile to maintain a different priority to ensure that the most important episodes and profiles are completed as quickly as possible. Since Castfire acts as the origin server for your CDN, there is no need to be transferring all of the files between servers or to your desktop – it is completely automated.
Rather than tinker with the encoder from Apple, we built our own encoder for our LAMP infrastructure. We have now transcoded over 1600 hours of http adaptive video — almost 2 years worth — using our custom encoding solution. We are extremely happy with the quality and the performance of it.
Lastly, we have utilized our existing infrastructure, that enables ad insertion from any VAST enabled ad server, to allow publishers to monetize ads in the http adaptive format. Clients like CBS Mobile and the Washington Redskins are using this today to monetize videos across all of the iOS devices.
If you would like to view the http adaptive profiles from some Castfire customers, check out:
by robert on January 11, 2010, under Clients, Devices, Partners
While Castfire powers video for a number of NFL teams, we’re very proud to announce that the Seattle Sounders is the first of hopefully many MLS teams to use Castifre to manage, monetize and reach their fans online as well as via mobile and in the living room!
Digitaria did a phenomenal job integrating Castfire and allowing fans to browse for exactly the video that they are looking for – or just see what’s available. For example, you find specific games, events and videos of particular players – as always, good work Digitaria (www.digitaria.com)!
Check out http://www.soundersfc.com/News/Video-Landing.aspx
by Brian Walsh on May 27, 2009, under Analysis, Devices, Living Room, Mobile
Business Insider has a chart that shows an amazing amount of growth for TV viewers on DVR’s and Mobile devices:
We continue to see the same amount of growth on those devices across our customer base. While flash delivery of web video continues to be a large portion of delivery, delivery for iPhone, Android, Tivo, Roku and Vudu are growing rapidly. We expect this growth to only accelerate over the coming 12-18 months as these platforms increase their install base and platforms like Yahoo Widgets begin taking hold in the living room.