Thriller Media Group

If you wish to stream your own video technical experience is not a prerequisite; you just need to follow some simple instructions and you will quickly be up and running. Continue on with this report and I’ll teach you how simple it is to get started right away.

You see, in order to ‘paste’ a video file onto one of your webpages, the initial job is to “translate” your raw video file into flv format (known as flash video) – this is the net’s preferred display format for videos. This unique format enables you to ’squeeze’ your videos onto a reasonable file size (so you won’t end up with ‘heavyweight’ files…) while maintaining a top quality display level.

No matter when you want to stream your own video, this distinctive format keeps your digital movies in a special mode known as ’streaming’; this means that anytime your viewers click on play they can begin viewing any of your video(s), without delays of any kind, and even better, without having to download or install anything on their pc.

Okay, so now you’re familiar with the system, and you’re probably asking yourself how to get up and running, the answer is quite simple – you’ve got to find a simple (yet professional) software solution to do that for you. This utility will have to be able to convert your initial file(s) to flv combined with an embedded movie player, so all you need to do is send the new video to your webserver, and insert a small code line onto your webpage, wherever you would like the video to be displayed, and it’s ready to go!

Now you understand that in order to stream your own video no special training is required, you need to look for a proper solution that will have you up and running with a few clicks of your mouse, it needs the capability to compress your movies to at least 10% of the original file(s), and provide you with a professional embedded flv player.

Video Conferencing – A Checklist

What do you wish to achieve?

• Point to Point two locations only at any one time
• Broadcast Live from one site to many watch and listen
• Broadcast pre-recorded from one site to many watch & listen
• Multipoint three or more sites with Q&A between any, relayed to all
• Multipoint – three or more plus broadcast from any to satellite sub-groups as a watch and listen.
• Live with session taped for future edit and distribution
• Person to person/s with video & audio & data manipulation across participants e.g. sharing documents, drawings with or without live edit and audit of changes made.

With whom do you wish to communicate by videoconferencing?

• Only inside your company
• From your company to sister/ contractor/ supplier companies
• With your customers
• With your prospects

Frequency of system use

• Ad hoc
• Estimated use per annum (min/max)
• Weekly
• Monthly
• Quarterly

Installation type

• Custom built static installation i.e. a designated room
• Desktop location/s i.e. from the office desktop PC
• Mobile “roll-about” system -
• Off-site facilities required going to a dedicated videoconference facility

Options required

• Record, Edit & Distribute by hardcopy (CD/DVD)
• Record, Edit & Distribute by softcopy (Web cast)
• Broadcast live via direct links to named recipients/ groups
• Broadcast pre-recorded across one or more time zones
• Log who watched and listened and when
• Multiple persons at One or Two (group to group videoconferencing e.g. design teams, board to local management)
• Multiple participants at Three or more sites

What are your current IT capabilities?

• ISDN 1
• ISDN 2
• ISDN 30
• LAN Cat5/ Cat5e/ Cat6
• LAN Fibre
• LAN wireless type?
• WAN bandwidth?
• VPN bandwidth?
• Internet access, dial-up 56k
• Internet access , Dial-up 128K
• Internet access , Broadband 1Mb
• Internet access , Broadband 2Mb
• Internet access , Broadband 4 Mb
• Internet access , Satellite link
• Internet access , permanent fibre/ cable link
• T1 / T2 / T3 / T4 (aka DS-1/ DS-2/ DS-3/ DS-4)
• OC-1 / OC-3 / OC-12 / OC-38

Impact on your system to be considered

• Bandwidth load
• Current capacity used & unused & reserved (max/ min for each)
• Planned bandwidth use excluding video conferencing
• Contention ratio
• Speed
• Video quality predominantly static (talking head Yes/No)
• Hardware at point of display
• Hardware at point of transmission
• Hardware at point of distribution

Points to consider

• Budget
• What do you spend currently on flights/ travel/ accommodation per annum?
• Write-off period for cap ex
• Leasing options
• IT infrastructure
• Cost and timescale of increased capacity and hardware -if required

1. It is cheap. The prices on web conferencing services have come way down in recent years. What used to cost literally hundreds of dollars has since deflated down to extremely affordable prices. Snoop around the web and you will find that decent web conferencing services can be had for as little as $20 per month. Buyer beware should be the rule as usual but this stuff isn’t only for $100 million dollar businesses anymore.
2. The productivity boom. Web conferencing can drive your business to be more productive. No doubt. More than half of my day used to be wasted going to and from meetings. Cutting out just 15% of travel time can make a huge difference. Wouldn’t you rather be doing something else besides waiting to go to meetings? Web conferencing can significantly cut down on your wasted time and can help your business become more profitable also.
3. The technology is there. The technology has piggybacked the broadband revolution. What used to be choppy video in a 3 inch by 4 inch square has turned fully interactive, multi-user, and full screen. Web conferencing is big, stable, and enjoyable. This part of the internet has come a long way since 1999.
4. Web conferencing is good for environment. Another bonus is that web conferencing allows you to save commuting time and therefore we use less fossil fuels. Everyone could deal with less global warming. The computer time used to web conference must be amortized in here somewhere as making and running a computer isn’t exactly fantastic for the environment. However, the few hours it takes to web conference surely outweigh the environmental damage that 5 people running their cars does to our planet.

Check out web conferencing. You’ll be amazed how far it’s come and how far you could go with it!

• Consider using LiveStream – ProCaster, WebEx, Go to my PC, Oovoo, Yahoo Messenger, Live Messenger and others for free and low cost video conferencing.

Stopping content thieves from taking your Flash video content requires a little extra work and some resources.  If you follow these guidelines, then your content won’t show up on PirateBay or YouTube.

There are lots of applications and plug-ins out there to allow you to capture video streams off the Internet.  It’s so easy that you may think there is no way to protect your content at all.  The following with give you some advice on how to protect your videos and sleep better at night.  You’re going to employ some extra services or buy some software, but if your content is valuable then it’s worth the investment

Protecting Windows Media content has been fairly easy for quite some time.  You can use the Windows Media DRM suite which will attach a digital certificate to the WMV file and require an active and valid cert to be downloaded in order to watch the video.  Although this system isn’t fool proof, it’s pretty strong and will stop most people dead in their tracks.  Microsoft is gearing up to roll out PlayReady which will plug the holes up in WM DRM.  It fully supports Silverlight in both Windows and Mac OS, and will be easy to use (so they say).  Look for a full deployment of PlayReady this summer.

But how do you protect Flash videos, specifically FLV, F4V, and MP4?  If you deliver your content via progressive download, then there will be little chance you can stop someone from taking that video from you with little effort.  Progressive download is literally downloading the file to the end user PC.  Where’s the protection?

There is no technology today to add DRM to the file itself.  Although there are some services out there that will offer something like that, they typically require you to use their proprietary Flash player in order to protect the content, who wants to do that?

So that leaves us with one option, protect the delivery of the video.  You may immediately think you can just stream the video using a Flash Media Server or Wowza server.  Think again.  Products like Replay Media Capture can snatch that stream right up.  What you need to do is stream the video using a Flash Media Server using RTMPE instead of RTMP.  You also need to disable RTMP from the server all together.  Adobe had a security warning about this awhile back.  Leaving RTMP on, allows for a back door.  RTMPE will encrypt the stream during delivery makeing it very difficult to de-compile and capture.

Are we done yet?  Nope, I’m just getting started…  What’s to prevent someone from discovering your stream name and then embedding that in their own Flash player?  You need to use SWF verification.  SWF verification will will ensure that the SWF playing the video is your SWF and not someone elses.  Again, you will need Flash Media Server to do this with.

Are we done now?  Not quite.  You’ll be delivering your SWF via HTTP to the browser, so it wouldn’t be too hard to locate that file and WGET it.  Now I have your player I can play it all I want.  What do you do now?  Use a Token based authentication with a time expiring URL.  These schemes usually use a MD5 128-Encrypted hash.  What will happen is, a unique URL will be used to play the video each and every time someone visits your site.  The URL will pass a token back to a secure server proving that the hash is authentic.  Then an time expire value is appended to the URL that will expire that link in a matter of seconds or a minute.  Nothing too long.  Access to the link is the only thing expiring, not the content.  So as long as the person has started watching the video with in that time frame, there is no problem even if the video is 2 hours long.  If they need to re-watch it, then they visit the site again and get a new URL.

All of this sounds like a lot of hassle and expense, is there an easier way?  If you deliver your videos through a CDN who uses FMS, then they probably offer all these services, you won’t have to incur any of these expenses.  Try a company called Influxis, they host FMS servers and you can setup a FMS how ever you want with minimal cost.

For a higher end solution, check out WideVine.  Widevine uses some proprietary technology which goes beyond what I’ve mentioned here.  Widevine’s intuitive DRM management tools offer total control over the encryption, key management, distribution and consumption of digital media. Using Widevine Cypher, pre-configured policies, digital rights and encryption are applied to inbound assets, automatically registered with Widevine and the CMS, then uploaded to a destination partner network or CDN.  Just know, that WideVine doesn’t come cheap!

I hope this information is useful for you.  Like all security on a computer, as soon as you plug a hole, another one is dug.  The goal is to stay one step ahead of the bad guys.

Thanks,

Mike Colburn (DigitalMediaGuy)

You may be asking yourself, what is a Flash Player?  or Why do I need one?  I have my Flash videos, won’t Internet Explorer or Firefox play them?  Have you ever tried to play a .FLV file on your computer?  You probably weren’t too successful in doing so.  .FLV is not a format that Windows Media Player or QuickTime player supports.  You can’t just link to a FLV file on your web page and expect the video to play like you would if it were a WMV or MOV file.  So how is it, that all these web sites have a Flash videos on them?

Whats unique about Flash is that you can create a customized player that embeds in a web site and plays the .FLV (and some other formats) on the web site.  There are stand along FLV players you can get for your desktop, but most people don’t have those installed because FLV isn’t the type of video file that gets downloaded to a computer.  It’s main purpose in life is play through a web browser.

In the old days (about 5 years ago), the idea of Flash and Video together was silly.  There was no FLV format and you had to embed the video file into a SWF, making the SWF a huge file.  The video wouldn’t play until the whole SWF loaded.  A lot of that changed as the FLV format became widely used.  The FLV would play through a Flash Player and supported progressive downloads (meaning you can watch the video as it downloaded).  Then along came Flash Media server and streaming and now the fun really started!  To read more about the differences between streaming and downloading, click here.

What exactly is a Flash Player?

Using an application like Adobe Flash, you create a small application and compile it into a Shockwave File (SWF),  when the SWF is embedded on the web page, it can accept commands to play media files and FLV is one of those media files.  SWF players are usually very small and download quickly while the web page is loading.  What’s so great about creating SWF players is that they can look and feel how you want.  You can add buttons and functionality.  You can add features like chat, or interactivity, advertising, social media aspects, and easily track video usage.  Think about a little bowling game built into the player, as you are watching a bowling video you can play the game.  All those nifty little animated advertisements you see on web sites, those are mostly Flash SWF files.

How easy is it to make a Flash Player?

Not too easy if you don’t know what you’re doing.  But there are some simple, and cost effective ways to add Flash Video to your site.  One of my favorites is the JW Player by LongTail Video.  This player is OpenSource and free to download (for non-commercial uses).  It’s one of the most popular players out there now and rightfully so.  Besides being a fairly easy to use player, it supports all kinds of plug-ins and since it’s OpenSource you can create your plug-ins or skins.

Here are some of my favorite add-on’s to the JW Player:

• Easy Advertising (they bring quality ads right into your video and you get paid)
• Viral Marketing (add embed, link and comments to your videos)
• Related videos (add a list of related videos for the viewer to see)
• Built in Google Analytics (track the behaviour of each video file)
• HD Button (click a button to swtich between HD and SD versions of the the video)
• Accessibility (Add closed captions to your videos)
• Play Lists (Create play lists displaying multiple videos)
• Player Analytics (Track player movements like, start, stop, pause, etc)
• YouSearch (Search for YouTube videos and plays them inside the JW Player)
• Dozens of pre-made skins to change the look and feel of the player

You can see that the JW Player is very flexible.  They have a great support community and will even provide tech support via email for free!

If you’re looking to add Flash Videos to your web site, there is no real reason to make a custom Flash Player.  A good developer would charge you several hundred to thousands of dollars to develop a player.  Instead use a pre-made one.  Of course there will be times when creating your own custom and branded player is essential.  When that time comes, expect to spend some money and time developing it.

Do I need a CDN if I have Cloud Computing?

Over last year or so, the term Cloud Computing has been making headlines.  There are several new entrants into the Cloud Computing industry.  The idea is simple, you have all these computers or servers directly connected to the cloud (The Internet) and you have massive computing power at your fingertips.  Companies like Rackspace, GoGrid, Amazon, and AT&T are all offering one form of Cloud Computing or another.

The services available from these companies range from simple “Cloud Storage”, to fully scalable virtual servers in the cloud.

When to use Cloud Computing
The great thing about these services is the instant setup and “unlimited scalability”.  When you want a new website, with a few clicks of a mouse you bring up a new Linux or Windows box.  They even make it easy for you by pre-installing services like SQL, Mail, and in some cases applications like Wowza or Windows Media streaming server.
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1. It is cheap. The prices on web conferencing services have come way down in recent years. What used to cost literally hundreds of dollars has since deflated down to extremely affordable prices. Snoop around the web and you will find that decent web conferencing services can be had for as little as $20 per month. Buyer beware should be the rule as usual but this stuff isn’t only for $100 million dollar businesses anymore.

Read more

Enables service providers to deliver video entertainment direct to iPhone subscribers

Seattle, WA and Taipei, Taiwan, June 29, 2009 — Widevine® today announced Synchronous Communications Co. has become a licensed reseller of Widevine DRM and Adaptive Streaming for the Apple® (NASDAQ APPL) iPhone. Synchronous Communications is a long standing provider of IPTV DRM technology to Chunghwa Telecom (NYSE: CHT), one of the largest IPTV service operators globally and the exclusive distributor of the iPhone in Taiwan.

“Widevine has solved the iPhone delivery challenge by giving service providers complete control over the consumer experience from delivery to playback,” said Brian Baker, Widevine CEO. “Service providers everywhere can now utilize Widevine to extend mobile services through their own branded video portal.”

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