Netflix or Blockbuster: Do Either Offer Total Access?

When it comes to online streaming of premium content, it appears that less is less instead of more.

Netflix stumbled badly, announcing this week that 800,000 subscribers left the service last quarter—over 200,000 more than the company had predicted as its "worst case" scenario. Part of the stumble was an assumption that customers would pay the same amount for online video access to a limited number of movies as they would for a much broader library of DVDs delivered by mail.

I covered this topic two days ago in an online article for StreamingMedia.com, a newsletter and magazine for which I have freelanced for a number of years. After the article was published, a radio station in Seattle, KOMO, requested a phone interview which I did on the 26th.

In addition, the editor of StreamingMedia.com, Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen, was also asked to be part of a section on Netflix on PBS Newshour show this evening.

To say this topic is hot would be an understatement, and Eric did a good job bringing to light—in a public forum—what we've often said on StreamingMedia.com: the online premium content world is still nascent and needs to grow to match the expectation (or hype) that many in our industry have pushed when trying to make streaming inventories equal to offline availability.

There's a need for a consolidated approach to online video libraries, ideally through a broader offering of content by a single provider; in the meantime, I'll also cover another approach that indexes what's available on multiple sites. Look for that article in a few weeks.

2011 Streaming Media Europe: Challenges for Android Video Delivery

In between trips to Nigeria and Ghana (for pro-bono work) I was able to speak at today's Streaming Media Europe 2011 conference, on the topic of Android video delivery.

The session presentation is available for download and StreamingMedia.com may eventually post the session video.

The presentation was a walk through the findings we reported in two white papers on the battery impact and performance impact of Flash Player for Mobile 10.1 (first report) and Flash Player for Mobile 10.2 / 10.3 (second report).

The findings, however, were the same for both tests: the native applications don't work nearly as consistently for video playback, and the impact of Flash Player for Mobile on battery life is a small price to pay for consistency in delivery (as in the actual ability to use hardware acceleration to play back full-screen, full-motion video).

2012 Q1 Best Workflows

Transitions has been hard at work on several continents (four and counting) over the past three months, after publishing attributed results for one company that participated in the 2011 Q1 Best Workflows research report.

Within the next two months, we expect to release invitations for the follow-on 2012 Q1 Best Workflows report, based on interest expressed by a number of companies. Stay tuned for more details.

2011 Q1 Best Workflows: Elemental Technologies

In December 2010, we published the 2010 Best Workflows report, a generic version of testing Transitions performed for a number of transcoding and live encoding hardware/software solutions. The report mentioned a few invited companies, but did not detail any one particular participant.

Elemental Technologies has requested that their findings be published, as the company did exceptionally well in a number of categories. The report, labeled as 2011 Q1 Best Workflows: Elemental Technologies, containing the same test results from the December 2010 final report, reveals a company hitting its stride on several fronts.

Flash Player 10.2 for Android Handsets and 10.3 for Motorola Xoom Tablet

Devices powered by the Android OS are gaining in popularity, with first quarter 2011 sales of Android-powered devices far outstripping those of Apple's iOS and Research In Motion's BlackBerry OS.

Yet the success brings with it a major issue—OS forking and code modification—inherent to open-source operating systems. The biggest area where this divergence can be viewed (or not viewed, as the case my be) is in the area of media consumption.

Our most recent report, titled The Right Fit? Video Playback Performance on Android Handset and Tablet Devices Using Adobe Flash Player 10.2 and 10.3 delves into the question of Adobe's Flash Player as a potential universal player for various media types on Android phones and tablets. 

We found that Adobe Flash Player seems to be progressing, alongside advances in the Android OS itself, to a point where we're seeing full frame-rate, high-quality playback on a number of devices.

While this sounds like a no-brainer, our last set of tests found few devices capable of playing 24 frame per second (fps) content at 24 fps, let alone playing back traditional video content at the 29.97 fps required to match fluid television playback.

Yet the past two months have significantly upped the ante: Adobe Flash Player 10.3 on the Motorola Xoom tablet was able to match native content's frame rates (both 24 and 29.97 fps) once the Motorola Xoom was upgraded to Android OS 3.1. This is an increase of 10-15% in frames-per-second playback, compared to Flash Player 10.2 on Android 3.0.1—the original shipping Xoom operating system.

In addition, the Motorola Atrix handset, which contains the same dual-core Tegra 2 processor and GPU, turned in impressive results. The Samsung Galaxy S also improved over its results in our initial tests of six Android handsets and now takes advantage of hardware acceleration for decoding.

The combination of an updated Android OS and an updated Adobe Flash Player seems to provide a much more consistent media experience for the average user.

Review: Video Compression for Flash, Apple (iOS) devices and HTML5

Jan Ozer, a colleague and friend who writes for Streaming Media magazine and a number of other online and magazine publications, has just released his most recent book: Video Compression for Flash, Apple Devices and HTML5.

The 258-page book covers the title's topics in detail, looking first at the evolution of the H.264 video codec (also known at AVC as well as MPEG-4 Part 10 for ITU and ISO) and how it has been adopted by Adobe for Flash Player, Apple for its past and current player (QuickTime 7 and QuickTime X, respectively) and Microsoft for its Silverlight player.

Jan then moves on to the questions of royalties (a topic I've covered in multiple articles, including one on H.264 and one on WebM) and then moves into the meat of the book: tips and tricks for working with a variety of compressor tools, including Apple's Compressor, Rhozet's Carbon Coder, Sorenson's Squeeze, Telestream's Episode and several others.

When it comes to specific environments where H.264 content will be played back, Video Compression for Flash, Apple Devices and HTML5 really shines. Whether it's encoding for the specific vagaries of Blu-Ray discs, Apple's multiple iOS devices—including the variations for iPhone/iPod versus the larger screen size of the iPad—or just the basics of Flash or Silverlight playback, the book examines processing and protocols necessary to make your streaming or offline delivery of H.264 a success. 

Jan's focus is on software-only encoding solutions, but the principles are the same for hardware-based encoding and transcoding solutions, such as the Elemental Server, Elemental Live and Inlet Spinnaker products tested during last year's 2010 Best Workflows report. 

I highly recommend Video Compression for Flash, Apple Devices and HTML5 for anyone needing to refine their media compression workflow, as the tips and insights Jan Ozer provides are pertinent to a variety of today's hottest consumer electronics devices.

Thunderbolt workflows

In a StreamingMedia.com article about the new MacBook Pro, published two weeks ago, we discussed the potential of camera connectivity through the new Thunderbolt port.

Today, Intel announced that Canon—makers of the fine EOS D-SLR cameras as well as consumer and professional video cameras—will be supporting the Thunderbolt technology.  An Intel press release reads, in part: 

Hiroo Edakubo, Group Executive of Canon’s Video Products Group stated, "We are excited about Thunderbolt technology and feel it will bring new levels of performance and simplicity to the video creation market."

Read additional thoughts on this topic—and the implications for live production equipment sizes—on our follow-up blog post at EventDVLive.com.

Roxio Toast Turns 11; But Can It Add?

In September, 2010, we posted an article about the issues highlighting the problem that Roxio Toast 10 Titanium Pro had with basic addition. The addition problems caused the program to underestimate how much content it could fit on a Blu-Ray disc. After eight hours of encoding, the actual number that Toast presented would be wildly off—to the tune of three or four gigabytes (3-4 GB).

This week, Sonic Solutions, who owns the technology and the Roxio brand name, announced the release of Roxio Toast 11 Titanium. Titanium is a lower-cost version of Toast (which also comes in a Pro version) and Titanium now contains the Blu-Ray plug-in that was only available in the Toast 10 Pro. This move saves users about $40 off the cost of purchasing Pro if Blu-Ray is the primary focus of your Toast usage.

Yet the question remains: can Toast 11 Titanium add any better than the previous Pro version? We're hearing initial reports of similar issues, which really brings into question Sonic's quality control on the Toast products, but we'll let you know what we find when we do a thorough review next week.

We are also hearing Toast 11 has speed issues in burning discs, where the speed of a 16x burner is reduced to 2x (even though the same burner runs at 15-16x in Toast 10).

Stay tuned to find out if remedial math works for Toast.

Flash Player 10.1 for Android: Performance King or Resource Hog?

A little over a month after completing our 2010 Best Workflows comparison, Transitions has decided to tackle another vexing question: does Flash Player 10.1 on the Android OS platform really impact battery life of mobile handsets?

If it does, is the performance gain worth it?

Read the results of our initial five-day test period, on a number of Android-based devices, including the the original Droid, Droid2, Droid Incredible, EVO, Nexus S and the core Galaxy S.

To put all the fuss about mobile Flash Player usage in perspective, consider that smartphone shipments accounted for 101 million units per quarter at the end of 2010, an increase of 87% over the same period in 2009. According to research firm IDC, smartphone shipments in 2010 outpaced PC shipments for the first time, with PC growth only progressing at 3% for the fourth quarter of 2010, on shipments of 92 million units.

It’s also worth noting how fast mobile Flash Player penetration grew: 28.7% of US smartphones are based on Android, an increase of 7.3% in market share over the last quarter. By the end of 2010, Android-based handset shipments surpassed the number of shipping iPhones devices: Apple’s iPhone market share is now only 25.0% excluding iPads (of which over 7 million were sold in the fourth quarter, while Android-based tablets are just emerging).

In other words, Flash-equipped smartphones now outnumber iOS handsets. Adobe’s intent to bring the Flash Player plug-in to other mobile OSes (Blackberry, et al) will only widen that gap.

20110209-Android-FlashPlayer10.1-Performance

The Clutter Cutter: NeatDesk for Mac

Our increasingly interconnected, automated and digitized world offers many benefits for businesses large and small. Yet one frustrating business situation seems almost impossible to solve: mountains of paper.

In the form of printed documents, receipts, expense records and all those business cards gathered from new contacts and business prospects, paper documents are one of the few things we can't seem to dig our way out from under.

I have tried several systems to deal with the mounting piles of pertinent information that still land in my home office, from the “desk stack” chess game to the “Pendaflex shuffle” in actual filing cabinets, to the “toss box” with the current year’s date marked on the side.

All of these systems have some merit. Looking back from the beginning of 2011, however, I still don’t know exactly what I have stored in all these collection areas from 2010. Throughout the past year, I found myself saying aloud all too often, “Is that contract in this pile? I’ve got to get the Scope of Work written!” and “Where is the receipt for last week’s prospecting lunch? I need to expense that.” I’ve also grown tired of storing all those business cards I collect, a desk drawer full of them.

One thing is certain at the dawn of a new year, I’m losing precious office space, time and ultimately money trying to keep up with all these dead trees. I'd happily recycle them all if I could just find an efficient and cost-effective way to organize the information in an easily accessible—preferably digital—form.

I’ve been looking for an automated solution that can feed all this stuff into my Mac and, ideally, integrate the data with Google Apps cloud-based document management that my consulting business uses.

With that end in mind, I recently decided to try the NeatDesk for Mac Desktop Scanner and its Digital Filing System.

Installation of the NeatWorks for Mac software and Neat Desk ADF scanner was easy and straightforward. The application even asked to autoupdate the first time I opened it. Nice touch.

During the installation, NeatDesk automatically created a Neat Library database file in the root of my Documents folder. When accessed through the NeatWorks for Mac application, this Digital Files System (DFS) provides a "cabinet" and a collection of customizable Folders within the cabinet that store all of the documents, receipts and business cards I scan. Working with the same paradigm in the paper world, NeatWorks use of the cabinet metaphor is helpful, as it’s getting hard to teach this dog new tricks.

NeatDesk scanner was fast and easy to use. For receipts and business cards, the OCR capabilities of the NeatWorks software does a good job in analyzing and segmenting the data off the scanned documents into their appropriate fields. No surprise here, as the original incarnation of this product, NeatReceipts, was geared towards generating expense reports.

All scanned items, whether a document, receipt or business card, land in the NeatWorks “Inbox” where you begin the filing process, with the software automatically identifies the type item you just scanned. Using the OCR data, NeatWorks automatically gathers metadata from the item to better identify its contents.

The application does have some problems with business cards that have colored backgrounds or unusual layouts. In this case you can easily edit and add the metadata yourself.

Interestingly, you don’t have to depend on the NeatDesk scanner to get data into NeatWorks. Anything that can be printed on the Mac can be sent to NeatWorks via the Neat specific options in the "Save to PDF" button in the print dialog box. This is helpful for me, personally, as a way to store some digital items I used to convert to paper for organizational purposes.

A few other features stand out. First, the data NeatWorks gathers from business cards creates contacts that can be exported to Apple's integrated Address Book, handy if you are synching Address Book with Google or Yahoo.

Second, receipts can be exported in .qif files for accounting and tax purposes in Quicken, or as individual PDFs to send to cloud-based apps such as Expensify. Scanned items can also emailed, through Apple's Mail application or other third-party applications such as Entourage or Outlook for Mac.

Lastly, by configuring the Folder Sync settings in the properties of any NeatWork’s Folder, you can automatically export the Folder’s contents from the Neat Library to the Mac’s local file system as individual PDFs. This feature is useful in that you can maintain copies of your critical data outside of NeatWorks, “just in case” the Neat Library file becomes unavailable. You can also upload these PDFs to Google Docs, for example, so they can be accessed via the cloud. Given these export and data movement options, I’m not concerned about all the scanned data living in the Neat Library database file.

All in all, I am happy to report that The Neat Company has put out a system that I believe can help me to slay “the Paper Monster” as they so aptly put it. While I don't think I'll ever be able to get to a "paperless" mode of working, I look forward to providing an update on my "less paper" resolution some time in the next few weeks, including whether it integrates well with Google Apps for cloud-based storage of documents I need on the run.