Video Processing Perspectives

Yesterday was Earth Day and Mother Nature smiled on Portlanders with a brilliant preview of summer weather, as temperatures reached record highs. It was a great day to write code on a park bench, brainstorm marketing ideas on a hike, or support customers during a long bicycle ride (not officially recommended).

The arrival of Earth Day also signified another important event. That’s right: the results are in for the Portland Afoot 2012 rankings of the region’s best employers for low-car commuters! Elemental is proud to place among the top five companies in the Portland metro area for the second year in a row. While there may not be a quantifiable improvement in the rankings department, Elemental saw its score elevate from a year ago thanks to our increased participation in the Bicycle Transportation Alliance (BTA) Bike Commute Challenge—we received an extra five points for our bike commute rate of over 20%! Our other perfect scores included providing transit passes to employees, lack of reimbursement for car parking (we’re ruthless) and shared vehicle access.

Michael Andersen, editor of Portland Afoot, stated that Elemental deserves “more credit than ever for understanding that great commuting benefits make workers happy, healthy and productive."

If you see us at a trade show, order our systems, or just spend some time on our website, you know that Elemental is green. It’s not always easy, but we do our best to apply the concept the color represents to our daily business practices.

Next up, we are excited for a community event this coming weekend: our third installment of Rebuilding Together. This event gives Elemental employees an opportunity to repair and rejuvenate the home of a family that requires a helping hand. This time we have a house in Northeast Portland in our sights. You’re not going to be able to recognize it when we’re done with it—and that’s a good thing.

The 2012 Olympics in London are set to be the biggest media event in history, and Elemental is keen to be in the thick of it. As the first truly “digital Olympics,” we can’t wait to see this summer’s games take video streaming coverage to the next level. 

Let’s take a look back at some streaming statistics from the 2008 summer games in Beijing and 2010 winter games in Vancouver:

• In 2008, NBCOlympics.com served 75.5 million streams during the games, totaling 9.9 million hours of online video coverage.
• The BBC served over 40 million streams which totaled 6.5 million hours of coverage the same year, including 200,000 concurrent streaming viewers.
• In 2010, NBC Olympics Mobile tallied 82 million page views and 1.9 million mobile video streams. This growth occurred even though the winter Olympics are often not as popular on a global basis as the summer games.
• Akamai delivered more than 5,000 hours of live and on-demand video over the 17 days of the winter games, totaling more than 12 petabytes of data across its Olympics customers. At the peak, it served more than 30 concurrent live-streaming events.

While these are impressive numbers, it is 2012 that grabs the title of the first truly digital Olympics. Clearly, over the course of little more than a fortnight, we’re going to see statistics that blow these prior numbers away.

But why will more viewers take in the games via streaming? A big reason is because of the unprecedented scope of streaming access. NBC, for example, announced in September that it will offer live coverage of all events, making this the first time viewers in the United States will have the chance to view any Olympic event as it happens. In the past, the network delayed popular Olympic events for primetime viewing, a policy that received a less-than-favorable response.

As broadcasters all over the world depart from these “primetime plans,” it brings up another issue: live coverage of every event means that viewers, no longer limited to the primetime timeslot, may not be home with the telly to view their favorite event. Broadcasters have responded by planning to stream to a wide array of connected devices, including set-top boxes, PCs, tablets and mobile devices, giving consumers access to the Olympics in ways never before possible.

Without providing specifics as to how many major broadcasters will be leveraging Elemental for the 2012 Olympics, we would just like to remind Mr. Phelps that no record is safe. One thing is certain, however: live and on-demand video streaming powered by Elemental will be seen far and wide.

As it is Valentine’s Day here in the United States, we thought it would be appropriate to express our affinity for the two newest members of the Elemental sales team: David Godfrey and Manuel De Peña. David joins Elemental as Vice President of Sales in Asia while Manuel will serve as Director of Sales for the Eastern US.

We can’t tell you how excited we are for these two to be on board. David brings with him more than 20 years of executive sales, marketing and operations experience as well as a deep knowledge of the broadcast, digital media and communications industries in Asia-Pac. He comes to us after spending time at both NDS and Tandberg. Most recently, he co-founded Imaginasia, facilitating sales of products from around the world into media and entertainment markets in Asia.

Manuel, meanwhile, boasts more than a decade of sales experience in the field of streaming video and compression. He joins us from Cisco after holding executive sales positions at both Inlet and Anystream.

These additions are a testament to the momentum Elemental continues to build and we are extremely fortunate to have attracted such top tier sales professionals. Yes, we think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas is one of the busiest and loudest technology trade shows of the year. This year, Elemental is pleased to reign in the noise with a demonstration of its new audio management technology with partner SRS Labs at the Trump International Hotel. 

Almost everyone has experienced obnoxiously loud commercials while watching television. The local car dealership may air an advertisement that is ten times louder than the television program it interrupts. Abrupt changes in broadcast audio levels and the extremely unpleasant viewing experience this creates became such an issue in the U.S. that legislators stepped in to enact the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act. The legislation mandates that networks and broadcasters deploy technology and equipment to ensure delivery of a consistent audio volume across programming and commercials to consumers. With comparable initiatives being put into place internationally, many of Elemental’s customers will be impacted worldwide. 

Elemental, today named one of America's Most Promising Companies by Forbes, is working with ESPN, the worldwide leader in sports programming, to create the on-demand video offered on the ESPN family of websites and ESPN iPhone, iPad and Android applications. ESPN is using Elemental™ Server to create 14 distinct video outputs for adaptive bit rate playback on each of these platforms. This enables the sports network to put high-quality digital highlight packages online faster than ever before to satisfy fan demand.