Video Processing Perspectives

We’ve had an eventful start to our week at Elemental, announcing today that we’ve raised $13 million in a Series C financing round led by Norwest Venture Partners (NVP). We’re honored to add NVP to our investor list that includes General Catalyst, Voyager Capital and Steamboat Ventures, who also participated in the round.

The new funding comes at a great time for us, as we have taken flight with recent key customer wins, including several streaming deals for the 2012 Olympic Games in London. It already feels like we are cruising at high speeds—now, this influx of capital turbocharges the company mid-flight!

In related news, Elemental named Kevin O’Hara as Chairman of its board of directors. Kevin joined the board just over a year ago and in his time here has instilled valuable wisdom upon the team based on his experiences as co-founder and president of Level 3 Communications and MFS Communications. Considering the speed at which Elemental is moving, even the slightest adjustment of the yoke can make a significant impact. We’re pleased to have Kevin and his steady hand involved with the company as we push ahead full throttle.

The most exciting aspect of the funding news is what it will enable on the hiring front. To aggressively expand, we are investing resources in the best and brightest folks the technology community has to offer. To our employees, we offer a spirited, stimulating and performance-driven environment in a new 17,000 square foot space. Whether your development expertise lies in Linux, REST, Ruby on Rails, or video codecs, we would love to have you as a member of the crew. Check out all our jobs here. One of the most rewarding elements of our work is seeing new faces populate Elemental and getting the chance to say “welcome aboard.”

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.

Reprinted from The Oregonian Op-Ed page, March 25, 2012.

In his powerful and stunningly public resignation letter ("Why I'm leaving Goldman Sachs"), Greg Smith comprehensively cataloged the rapid decline in his company's corporate culture. His writing struck a chord with me here in Portland, 3,000 miles away from Wall Street. When a company's leadership loses its way and neglects the core values that made it successful in the first place, the inevitably resulting downward spiral is swift and unforgiving. Goldman's fall from grace is just the latest public example of this, and corruption of corporate culture is certainly not limited to the financial industry: Companies such as Enron and WorldCom devolved over time into similarly toxic cultures that led to corporate implosions with enormous costs to employees, shareholders and society. 

Events at the Portland Memorial Coliseum this weekend (March 9-10) will capture the interest of techno-geeks and sports enthusiasts alike. AutoDesk and Oregon FIRST Robotics are hosting a regional tournament in which robots, designed and built by teams of local high school students, will compete in a basketball game dubbed the “Rebound Rumble”. Like many sporting events, it will be played in an arena, involve teams of talented people, result in scoring, and operate under the constraints of a time clock. Elemental is proud to support this event. We’ll be on hand with our Elemental Live encoder to capture all the action from the pit in the Coliseum and stream it live over the Internet. Elemental Live will perform adaptive bit streaming for both Flash and Apple HLS, so you can watch these kids operating robots in a tournament setting on your computer, iPad or iPhone. Check out the live event stream here.