Beet.TV Interview: Sam Blackman on how online video is the new black

Submitted by admin on December 18, 2009 - 11:19

Last month at the NewTeeVee conference, Beet.TV spoke with Sam Blackman, Elemental's CEO about the launch of Elemental Server, a new appliance for transcoding HD (and SD) video at "faster-than-real-time" rates and market implications for online video technology and products attempting to satiate the demand for video.

 

Lights, Camera, Streaming!

Submitted by gregt on October 1, 2009 - 10:48

It’s been an exciting (and busy) summer at Elemental. In addition to heavy development of Elemental Server, our file-based transcoding solution, we started thinking about how to apply our GPU encoding technology to support streaming live events over the web. In today's world of adaptive bitrate streaming, live encoding solutions need to support significantly more streams than in the early days of web broadcasting.  The density of streams that we can achieve using GPUs is far beyond that of CPU-only solutions, so it’s a natural extension of our technology.

I learned a very valuable lesson while working on live encoding...never show something to a CEO that you aren't ready to show to the world.  One Friday back in July, I was playing around with an HD-SDI input card and a signal generator.  After a few hours of coding, I had a video stream of some fancy color bars being encoded in real time, and showed a few people around the office.  Sam, our CEO, caught wind of this and got so excited he said, "Hey, Jen-Hsun Huang (CEO of NVIDIA) is dropping by the office this afternoon, do you think we can have this ready to demo for him?"  In the startup world, things move fast ... but usually you get more than just a couple hours to prepare a demo for external viewing!  A few rebuilds later, Jen-Hsun showed up at Elemental world headquarters (earning cheers by bringing with him a couple cases of beer) and we were able to show off our first live H.264 stream produced on an NVIDIA GPU. Now that I'd shown this to two CEOs, there were sure to be painful repercussions ...

HD4PC Gives Elemental Accelerator Kudos

Submitted by Lisa on September 2, 2009 - 14:11

The latest release of Elemental Accelerator gets high marks from High Definition for PC (HD4PC) in a review posted on September 1st, 2009. The author highlights the peformance gains available with GPU-accelerated MPEG-2 encoding:

"My 3Ghz 8-Core workstation can already encode my HD timelines to MPEG2 for DVD faster than realtime, but with the Elemental Accelerator, I was able to cut the time for a two minute export from 1:27 to 30 seconds.  On a two hour clip, that would be a thirty minutes instead of an hour and a half."

The peformance boost Elemental Accelerator brings to mobile platforms is also called out:

"...the GPU can accelerate the processing intensive AVCHD decode, as well as the MPEG2 or H.264 encode...If you frequently make these types of exports from a laptop with a Quadro GPU, this plugin will be worth it."

You can read the full review here.

Elemental Accelerator Product Tour Video

Submitted by Sam on August 24, 2009 - 15:38

As you may expect, video is near and dear to our hearts at Elemental. Those who have been following us for years will certainly recall the original Badaboom commercials, which tended to incite strong reactions: some people loved 'em, others thought they were too corny. We believe our newest foray into production is consistent with the professional grade product it represents.

With the Elemental Accelerator product tour video, we wanted to increase the use of motion graphics to create a visceral, impactful illustration of the power of our GPU-accelerated software. Lisa, product manager, and Julie, communications manager, drove the process working closely with local production company Funnelbox Studios to create a unique, professional overview of Elemental Accelerator in 2 short minutes. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Elemental Accelerator Product Tour Screenshot

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