Live From South Africa: Kicking and Streaming

Submitted by Eli on June 17, 2010 - 01:47
World Cup 2006:  - "Did you see that goal by Brazil?"
                             - "No, I wish.  I'm at work.  I'm tracking the play-by-play online, though.  Was it a good shot?"
World Cup 2010:  - "Did you see that goal by Brazil?"
                             - "Yes, which one do you mean? I saw both! That first one by Maicon was so amazing that I had to rewind my stream to see it again.  I thought for sure the goalie deflected it, but in slow motion you could see that he just bent it right in. Well I need to go file this report!"

 

In the technology world, four years is an eternity.  So, those of us woking on streaming technology not only understand its evolution in the last four years, but can truly appreciate how the presence of video everywhere has revolutionized coverage of the 2010 World Cup.

World Cup ESPN3 Screenshot

Streaming Bandwagon: Learn to Stream Live Like a Pro

Submitted by Whitney on May 3, 2010 - 15:04

Camera for Live StreamingWhen it comes to live streaming (aka webcasting), everybody's doing it. It's now commonplace to watch the news or playoffs on TV as well as on our laptops and smart phones. Watching current events, like the gubernatorial races across the country, are no exception. Who wants to wait for the recap at 10 o'clock or for the Newsweek Index next week to see who put their foot in their mouth on the campaign trail today? We want our content live, in real-time, and when necessary, free from the tether of the television.

Broadcasters here in Oregon, such as NBC-affiliate KGW Channel 8 and Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB), are getting in on the political action by streaming our candidates' debates live. In addition, OPB's multi-channel approach for the "Think Out Loud" series includes a radio broadcast this morning and TV broadcast tonight at 9 p.m. PT, along with live streaming to the web with content encoded by Elemental Live.

Top 5 Reasons You Need Elemental Live in Your Workflow

Submitted by Sam on April 5, 2010 - 12:39

Today, we announced the next step in the evolution of Elemental's enterprise-class product line: Elemental Live. Over the past two years, we've brought an array of products to market, ranging from a high-speed encoder for professional video editors to our new video processing system for live event streaming. With each product, we have focused our development on dramatically improving the end-user workflow by speeding up video processing and conversion using GPUs and maximizing video quality through proprietary codecs, designed in-house. We've upped the ante again, challenging the video processing paradigm with Elemental Live's features that streamline the live event production and delivery workflow.

Elemental Live Workflow

Elemental Live receives an input stream directly from an SDI source, such as a camera, or a UDP (IP) stream and provides format conversion, image processing and container conversion, outputting a new stream compatible with the desired streaming media server. Multiple streams are then delivered to each end user device.

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 ...

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