Video is everywhere, whether you’re looking at the home, the office or the mobile device.
Telcos in recent years have looked to home video services, often based on IPTV (News - Alert) technology, as a way to complete their product bundles and counterbalance some of their losses on the residential wireline side. Meanwhile, the cable companies and DBS outfits have expanded their video offerings and capabilities on various fronts.
Video is also moving in new directions as both over-the-top and traditional service providers introduce services that offer more flexible video experiences, such as the ability to view content from a wider range of devices and locations. That sometimes involves video platforms and services that support mobile video. Indeed, mobile video is the fastest growing segment in the cellular arena.
And while the role of video is certainly growing in many of our personal lives, it’s also expanding on the business front. According to Steve Vonder Haar, research director and founder of Interactive Media Strategies (News - Alert), despite the dampening effects of the recession in recent months, spending on business video equipment and services expanded at a 15 percent rate in 2009, reaching $531 million for the year.
In light of the growing focus on video/IPTV services and products, INTERNET TELEPHONY is proud to announce the winners of its IPTV Excellence Awards. This year’s award recipients include Harmonic, for its Harmonic ProStream 4000; Vantrix, for the Vantrix Media Broadcaster; and VBrick (News - Alert) Systems Inc. for the VBrick Enterprise Media System. Below is a brief description of each product.
The Harmonic ProStream 4000
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Other features of the solution include its high-performance, high-reliability Flash memory-based server architecture; high density; interoperability with a wide range of streaming servers, cell phones, PC media players and IP-based set-top boxes; support for Apple (News - Alert) HTTP live streaming for iPhone 3.0, and Microsoft live smooth streaming for Silverlight; the ability to transcode any HD input into 720P/60fps video outputs; and integration into the MediaPrism Convergence suite.
The Vantrix Media Broadcaster
The Vantrix Media Broadcaster adapts the bit rates and formats of video and audio streams to enable wireless service providers to reach the greatest number of end user devices and address changing network conditions.
The product supports such applications as video streaming, mobile TV and radio, video and audio on demand, video sharing, user-generated content, video alerts, video telephony, video surveillance, and video ad insertion.
Vantrix Media Broadcaster is a bundled solution of two individual products that can be offered separately and integrated within a media delivery chain. One of those products is the Vantrix Stream Optimizer, a live media adaptation engine that performs ingestion of live streaming content, adaptation based on device capability and network congestion, and packaging for streaming by a streaming server. The other product is the Vantrix Media Streamer, a high-performance streaming engine that ingests pre-encoded media, can do packet duplication if necessary, and supports SBRA (3gpp compliant static bit rate adaptation) and streaming.
The VBrick Enterprise Media System
The VBrick Enterprise Media System is an IP video communications platform that provides the user interface, scheduling and administrative control, as well as a media management engine that guarantees a top drawer video experience.
The solution includes an end-user viewing portal, rich-media presentation delivery, a broadcast and recording scheduler, an interactive channel guide, an intelligent video networking engine, and system administration.
The VEMS platform tightly integrates into the IBM (News - Alert) Lotus Sametime Unified Communications and Collaboration suite, providing instant access to live and on-demand IP video content from the Sametime client. That means Sametime users now have convenient access to live TV channels, allowing key employees to monitor selected commercial TV channels and to tune in to local broadcasts such as a CEO address, training program, regulatory compliance training, and more.
VEMS also works with existing network conditional access schemes by supporting LDAP, Active Directory, and single sign-on.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi
