On Wednesday, June 25, roughly 50 attendees met at Qualcomm's Q-Auditorium for a discussion on streaming video. Chad Reese, New Media Producer at Wells Publishing, Inc. was the evening's host. Reese started the evening with speaker introductions and a little levity.
Josh Carlson, VP of Technology at Wells Publishing, Inc. began the formal presentations by covering different strategies for moving video over the Internet. Carlson described the differences between live streaming, progressive download and pseudo-streaming, and provided examples and benefits of each video strategy.
Following Carlson, Philip Hodgetts of Burbank, CA presented a "state of the industry" report on streaming media. Hodgetts, a visionary and commentator on industry trends in post production and emerging digital distribution technologies, covered a lot of ground in his talk, discussing best-practice encoding techniques and different ways to monetize video content. He concluded his discussion with an explanation of Open Television Network, a system for monetizing video content for independent video producers and viewers. Be sure to catch more of Philip Hodgetts at ProTrack 2008 in Anaheim. He is scheduled to do a session on HD Post Production.
As a streaming media proof-of-concept, the event was streamed live from Qualcomm's Q-Auditorium. Using an Internet streaming system designed by Josh Carlson, cameramen Bill Bork, Chad Reese and Luke Jungers fed images to Tory Chainel of Video Gear, who worked the Datavideo SE-800 Digital Video Switcher [link: http://www.datavideo.us/se-800.html]. A Firewire cable from the DataVideo switcher was attached to a PC laptop with a Sprint AirCard and Flash Media Encoder 2.5. The encoded video stream was pushed to the Influxis Flash Media Interactive Server 3 and distributed to Internet viewers.
Special thanks to Martin Banks, Jeff Merrill and Tory Chainel of Video Gear for the setup, technical support and use of the Datavideo SE-800 Digital Video Switcher . Video Gear also provided one of the video cameras, a projector and the audio system for the evening's presentations. The San Diego MCA-I would also like to thank Wells Publishing, Inc. for providing a delicious meal catered by "Organic to Go"; and Mark Pishny, Dean Velasco and Qualcomm for their generous time and efforts while hosting this event.
