The following is an article written by Wes Simpson for DV.com. The original posting can be found here. So thank you Wes and DV for this very relevant posting from the readers of the Marcellus Blog:

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Flash video is a technology that is widely used on Web sites throughout the Internet for delivering video (and other) signals to a wide variety of different devices.

Flash video files and live streams can be displayed on handheld devices (such as the new Droid from Verizon Wireless), all types of laptops, netbooks and desktop PCs as well as a growing number of televisions that have Ethernet ports for displaying content from sites such as YouTube. Originally created by a company called Macromedia, Flash is now a product of Adobe Corp.

WHY USE FLASH?
Flash’s big advantage is the widespread distribution of the software required to play Flash content on a variety of devices throughout the online world. Adobe claims on their Web site that 98 percent of Internet-enabled desktops worldwide have the Flash player installed, and so do hundreds of millions of other devices.

Having the support of the dominant online video providers is obviously a big plus for market penetration, but Flash has a number of technical benefits as well.

Flash is particularly strong in Web sites that combine both vector animation and bit-mapped raster graphics. Vector graphics require much less data compared to sending frame after frame of data describing the changes to hundreds of pixels, even using advanced compression technologies.

Flash also supports H.264 compression, which is used around the world for video recording and delivery. Ideally, this would allow video that was already compressed using H.264 to be directly imported and streamed without much manipulation, or for video to be exported easily to other players.

Unfortunately, Flash’s advanced stream management techniques, coupled with the variable bit-rate control methods used, make this impractical. Instead, videos normally require transcoding before they can be streamed using Flash, and similar manipulations are needed to export Flash files for playback in other formats. This is a double-edged sword — Flash can deliver high-quality images to users on many different platforms, but it has the drawback of requiring unique file structures.

HOW DOES IT WORK?
Flash video is delivered to clients by way of a Flash server, either from a pre-recorded file or as a live stream. In either case, the process is quite similar.

It begins when a user decides to view Flash content. The user can request the content through a Web page hosted by the Flash server, or, much more commonly, the request is made through another Web page that redirects the user’s request for content to the Flash server.

In either case, the user’s device (client) sends two messages to the server to initiate the client-server handshake. Adobe recently published the protocol used in this process, called RTMP (for Real Time Messaging Protocol). Once this handshake is complete, the resulting connection is used to deliver video, audio and other content.

Decoding and displaying the content on the user’s device is performed by Adobe Flash Player software that must be installed on the user’s device before display or playback can begin. This software is typically configured as a plug-in to a Web browser, which means that the browser is responsible for activating the player software and for facilitating the flow of data between the server and the player.

One major benefit of plug-ins is that they can be updated without requiring any changes to the browser software, allowing for rapid innovation. In addition, a plug-in can contain proprietary code or tools for handling encrypted content that do not need to be incorporated into the browser.

Flash plug-ins also support the ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVSM), a software construct that implements a set of common, well-defined behaviors, enabling developers to write a single application that can run on a variety of different platforms, such as Microsoft, Apple and Linux.

Scripts can contain a number of actions for many different types of behavior, such as user interaction, stream management, Web site access and other functions. The ASVM gives Flash a lot of power that can be harnessed by developers to create rich multimedia experiences and even to create games that are written entirely in ActionScript.

CREATING THE VIDEO
Creating a Flash video can be deceptively simple — many Web sites will accept video files in any of a number of different source formats and create a Web page containing that video in a matter of minutes. Similarly, self-contained, portable Webcasting appliances can be used to convert live video signals directly into streams. However, several steps must occur to produce the final product — either a live stream or a file that can be hosted on a server and streamed on demand.

The first step in the process is acquisition, where the source video signal is brought into the appliance for processing. When the signal is a composite/component/SDI video source originating from a camera, tape machine or similar device, this process is known as capture, wherein the video signal is fed into a specially designed interface board that converts the signal into a form suitable for further processing within the appliance.

In the case of video content that is already in a file, the process begins by copying the video clip or file into the appliance, which is often called file capture or upload.

The next step in the process is compression. This needs to be done using one of the compression formats support by Flash technology, such as those provided by Sorenson, On2 or the standard H.264 format (available since the launch of Version 9 of Adobe Flash). Scaling is often also done during this step, whereby the size of the original video frame is adjusted to fit the size of the destination video device, either through stretching or squeezing the video image (normally) or through cropping (rarely).

The final step in the process is to apply a “wrapper” to the video content that helps the playback device understand how the video and related audio or other content is to be interpreted. This wrapper contains information (metadata) about the video image format; lists the compression codecs used to create the data; and describes any other signals such as audio or text that will form part of the output of the viewer. Wrappers, which are also called “containers,” provide a common format for communicating the relevant information about the stream, thereby enabling the playback device to quickly and easily determine how the bits within the stream are to be decoded and displayed.

DELIVERING THE VIDEO
Two methods are frequently used for delivering Flash video to viewers: real-time streaming and on-demand streaming. With real-time streaming a video signal is delivered to one or more viewers from a single source, which can be live or pre-recorded video. This technique is often used for broadcasting live news on Web sites such as CNN.com, and the viewer “tunes-in” to the ongoing program while it is playing.

In contrast, with on-demand streaming, each viewer receives a stream that is custom-delivered to his or her viewing device, on a time schedule that is controlled by the viewer, who can pause, rewind and fast-forward the video. YouTube and many other sites use this technique. Two different, but related, technologies are used to support these two delivery methods.

In real-time streaming, the big challenge is to make a copy of the source stream for each of the viewers who is currently watching. Because the public Internet and many private networks are not multicast-enabled, each viewer’s device must receive a unique sequence of data packets addressed specifically to the user’s device IP address.

To accomplish this task, a “reflecting server” is used to take a single incoming stream and generate multiple output streams.

As shown in Figure 1 (above), video is fed from a source to a Webcasting device, which captures the video, compresses it, and places it into the Flash stream wrapper and format. The reflecting server then replicates this stream for each client device.

In parallel, a portal Web site is often set up that serves as a landing page for user devices to get information about available streams. Clients that navigate to this page are redirected to the reflecting server to actually receive the stream.

The process for on-demand streaming is shown in Figure 2 (above). First, the video content must be created and uploaded to a Flash server. Inside the Flash server, content files are transcoded as necessary into the final Flash streaming format and stored. In parallel, the author of the content will often create a Web page that contains an ActionScript that tells viewers about the available content and give them controls to begin video playback.

These Web pages will redirect the client devices to the Flash server to actually receive the streams. Typically, these Web pages will display a thumbnail that is a single frame selected from the video to illustrate the contents.

GETTING STARTED
A large ecosystem of software and systems has grown up to serve the Flash video market. One of the easiest ways to begin real-time streaming is to rent or purchase Webcasting equipment that is available from a number of suppliers. These self-contained units have video and audio inputs and Ethernet outputs that deliver one or more fully compliant Flash streams. Also, the services of a reflecting server can be purchased or rented as needed to replicate the stream to many viewers. Companies using this approach can get on the air quickly without a huge expenditure of time or money for purchasing systems and training. So what are you waiting for?

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Again – thank you Wes and DV.com

This really has no place on a corporate blog. But then again, it does.

Peter King talks about the feel good story of this NFL season, in reference to the Denver Broncos:

” Whether Denver’s a championship team or not — and allowing an insane 6.5 points per game through four weeks suggests they’ll battle San Diego for the AFC West title — there’s one thing you have to love about the Broncos: They’ve got a Patriot way (what a coincidence!) of tuning out the outside crappola and focusing on the only thing that matters — the next play. They tuned out the Jay Cutler thing. They tuned out the Brandon Marshall distraction. That’s not easy in an NFL-crazy market like Denver, but McDaniels did it. “DO YOUR JOB” is the gigantic wall art in the Broncos’ team meeting room, something McDaniels brought with him from New England and his mentor, Bill Belichick. And it’s what his players are doing.

Now let’s do a mini-analysis of the biggest decision of the off-season, Denver dealing Cutler for two first-rounders and Kyle Orton. It reminds me of the Patriots dealing Drew Bledsoe in 2002 and handing the quarterback job long-term to Tom Brady. Bledsoe, the independent-thinking mad bomber; Brady, the caretaker who’ll follow the gameplan to a T. Just substitute Cutler for Bledsoe and Kyle Orton for Brady and you’ve got McDaniels’ line of thinking. Now, I’m not saying (and McDaniels wouldn’t either) that Orton’s going to morph into Brady, but the amount of negative plays at the quarterback position has been exactly what McDaniels has preached: zero interceptions, zero lost fumbles, six sacks. If Orton continues on his present pace — 3,624 passing yards, 20 touchdowns, 59 percent passing (that should be a tick better) — the Broncos will be playing in January.”

That’s exactly right: DO YOUR JOB.

(P.S.: Thanks for the pointer, Riff)

We’ve recently had to break something of a sweat in figuring out how to track conversions using Google analytics, when the goal funnel involves sub-domains.

In case anyone else runs into similar problems, here’s what you do:

1) Add this line(in BOLD, below) to your Google Analytics code, on both the starting page(step 1) as well as the conversion page(step 2).

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try{
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxxx-x");
pageTracker._setDomainName(".example.com");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}
</script>

2. Then, if your start page(where visitors land) is: http://mydomain.com/start/index.php and your conversion page(where people land after signup or something like that) is: http://sub.mydomain.com/welcome/index.php, then you specify your funnel as:

Step 1: www.mydomain.com/start/index.php

Step 2: sub.mydomain.com/welcome/index.php

3.  That’s it. You’re done.

After announcing a few months ago that they were shutting down Brightcove.TV, Brightcove has now announced that they will be discontinuing their ad-supported free version.

The upwards jump is scary..from $0/year, you’re now faced with $6000/year.

I remember a recent interview when Jeremy Allaire said: “We’ve made multiple bets, and the platform side won.”

• Obviously, some publishers lost. Especially given the current economic context.
• We shudder to think of the money that went into funding Brightcove.TV and all those free ad-supported accounts.
• Finally, Brightcove seems to think that several hundred dollars a month is a “low-cost” service. Pull up SaaS offerings today, and find me something that has a basic service running into several hundred dollars a month.

Hmph!

We’re trying to figure out what we can do to help. Obviously, this is a big opportunity for us, but we also want to see how we can help, beyond just offering an alternative.

Initial thoughts include:

• making it simple for Brightcove Basic customers to transition into the Marcellus platform
  • importing videos
  • importing metadata
  • anything else……?
• making it very cost-efficient to make the transition
  • we’re planning on waiving the SaaS fee for Brightcove customers
  • we’re planning on creating a special pricing model attuned to this new reality.

Two weeks is all we ask. Please stay tuned, and I promise to respond with a solution.

I say this on a personal note, acknowledging that some of you might feel otherwise, including some folks over at Marcellus, but I need to say this:

It is not a political fever that has gripped the world. It is Obamania that has the world glued to their TV sets today, and it is because of Obama that the world is paying attention to McCain. If Joe Lieberman was running against McCain, then McCain wouldn’t have had the votes he did.

It’s because of the radically different mindset that Obama embodies(and will hopefully put into action), that some people are sticking with what they know and identify with best…an honest man who has served the nation with his soul, and who will uphold, not uproot, what they believe in. And in fact, perhaps even do it better than his predecessor. Which is true..anyone can do a better job than George W. Bush, and John McCain respects America too much to damage it further.

However, this is not a time for bandages. In fact, no amount of bandages can stop America from bleeding. The wounds are so deep, and the damages so severe, that the only solution is for us to start with an acknowledgement that we have screwed up very badly. We screwed up by not paying attention to the foundations for our growth, despite a severe warning less than a decade ago when the dot-com collapse occured. We screwed up by sending our country into a war that didn’t exist, in the most Quixotic of manners. We screwed up by choosing to “Stay the course” and pretending we’re right, when we should have cut our losses and not sunk $3 trillion dollars, just to save face.

The irony, of course, is that $3 trillion + $770 billion later, America is now a laughing stock of the world, anyway.

In my opinion, the only way out of this mess, is a hard, long-drawn battle. A battle to become frugal, a battle to spend less, a battle to give back at least as much as one takes, a battle to understand values without preaching them, a battle to educate, a battle to learn, a battle to accept, a battle to acknowledge diversity, a battle to say no to the easy way out, a battle to learn restraint, a battle to understand peace, a battle to build prosperity..not buy it.

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A lot of us, hopefully enough of us, believe that Barack Obama, and not John McCain, is the person to lead America through this time. The argument isn’t about which of the two is the better person or the better leader. The argument is about who the RIGHT person is, given where America stands today.

And isn’t that what America has always been about..? The right person for the job?

So, don’t vote for Obama, or for McCain. Vote for who you think is the right person for the job.

And in the meantime, enjoy Obamania. It’s never coming back again. Not in our lifetimes, at least.

Head on to over to Google search, Yahoo search, Ask.com, and Windows Live search….type in “SaaS video platform“. Interesting to see that we’re already way up there in the results, despite folks like Ooyala, Delve, and many others in the space.

Interesting..because we don’t do much SEO, so if anyone has thoughts on how we’re up there, then do let us know.

Google thinks we are second

Yahoo brings us up first. No mention of our nearest and dearest competitor.

We do not feature anywhere on Windows Live search. But Live Search sucks.

Happy Halloween!

We just decided that our player looks nicer without the chrome scrubber area.

Check out the Madagascar trailer here.

What do you guys think?

We had to do a re-compilation of our PHP installation earlier today, to add in a few extensions. After a lot of Google-ing, we didn’t find anything about this, but someone helped us out(thanks, Sunil!).

So, if you need to re-compile your existing PHP installation, and retain your earlier extensions/settings, do the following:

• find the config.nice file on your system

• edit it to add in the extensions you need to add (eg. '--with-curl' \)

• run make and then do a make install

That’s it. You’re good to go.

Enjoy.

A number of you have asked us over the last few days, if there is a Marcellus API.

Which tells us:

• Setting up a classy workflow is still a problem
  • upload, content management, customization, and publishing are fundamental challenges for many
• The work flow needs to be ubiquitous
  • it’s one thing to use workflow on Marcellus. It’s quite another to be able to access the same workflow on YOUR website
• Scale and economics are SERIOUS considerations
  • And therefore, a reliable cloud infrastructure is a huge blessing for online video

So, to answer your questions:

• We ARE working on the Marcellus API. With a little luck, we’ll have it ready for you by Christmas of this year.
• Before the API arrives, we’ll be launching a community video platform: mia. You can read more about it at http://www.marcellus.tv/mia

We’re keeping mia a little hush-hush for a bit. Not because it’s a big secret that we want to hide, but because we’re trying to figure out what feature set to launch it with. So, if you have ideas/thoughts on what you’d like to see when we launch, just place a comment on here, or write to us.

We are: buzz (at) marcellus (dot) tv

It’s quite interesting. Michael Arrington deleted my comment yesterday, linking to an Alexa chart of Techcrunch traffic and page views, from the time they started out. All I’d done was link to the chart…seriously…that’s it.

Of course, here are the stats from Alexa. I still haven’t quite bought into the accuracy of Feedburner stats(although I think the tool itself is fantastic).

Techcrunch Traffic

Techcrunch- Page Views

Why was I looking this up?

Because I’m starting to see a trend on Techcrunch. There is an increasing(albeit relatively minor) volume of noise in there, fueled by none other than the guys at TC. Of course, they are free to write about whatever they want, but the expectation is that they do reviews of startups, and of new things that old companies are doing. It’s right there on their “About us” page.

I had written about this on the WeareIndia blog way in February 2008; more importantly, Umair Haque had spoken about this first..that Techcrunch might have peaked.

Here’s what he’d said: “I’m gonna make a prediction. TechCrunch (etc) are peaking. Without investing in the community – instead of just endlessly playing the community against itself – further growth (real growth, not just beta) is going to be more and more costly.
I’m gonna call this set of dynamics the TechCrunch Effect. It’s the opposite of building a community. Instead of making a set of people with similar interests better off, you wedge them and divide them.
Yes, you can get attention that way – by tapping the dynamics of competition. No, you can’t sustain it – because the returns to competition are dominated by the returns to cooperation in a world where anyone can compete.”

I think the graph above tells the rest of the story. You should also head on over to Alexa and check out the PageViews over time. I can understand lesser traffic, but when pageviews decline like that, it generally means that your time is up.

—

However, I’m not the kind to make an example out of one aberration. So I picked up stats for ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, Last100, and NewTeeVee..just for shits and giggles, and here’s what I found:

The smaller sites(NewTeeVee/Last100) haven’t shown the growth curves that RWW/TC have. And neither are they showing the same steep decline curves.

RWW/Mashable/Last100

I wish I had numbers at hand to tell you %age declines for each site from day 1 to day N, but I don’t. But I’ve been losing sleep over these graphs and I keep arriving at one conclusion only: every start-up review site has a life-span.

That life-span is defined by quite a few factors, and IMHO, they could be prioritized as:

1. Focus: do what you promised to do, and do it well
2. Class: ignore what others are doing, so you can stick to #1- Focus. Don’t gloat, speak ill of others, or talk about Karma. Especially when you don’t know that the results of “bad karma” don’t kick in until the next life. =)
3. Quality: Just because Feedburner says that YOU have a million daily readers, doesn’t naturally imply that the rest of us are idiots. Focus on quality…please don’t feed us shit. We get a lot of that everyday, anyway. And we know it when we see it.
4. Engagement: Engaging your users isn’t the same as dueling with them. Figure out meaningful ways for your users to participate on your site, rather than sparking off a pissing contest every other Sunday.
5. Lose the attitude: A spunky nonchalance about being able to do/say/write what you want on your blog may appeal to the ones who enjoy spunk. For the rest of us, it’s really irritiating. So, pretty please, with sugar on top, lose the attitude.

I’m sure there are more, but that’s all I’ve got time for, right now.

We have a startup to run, so just thought I’d send in a not-so-subtle note to Mike Arrington and his comrades at Techcrunch.

(Sure, word to RWW, Last100, Mashable, and New Tee Vee as well..)

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