Archive for August, 2010

Broadcast Interactive Media Selects Panvidea

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

Broadcast Interactive Media Selects Panvidea to Encode and Distribute Local Video News and User Generated Content

Panvidea’s Cloud Service Enables Local Broadcasters to More Efficiently Upload, Transcode and Publish Video News and Metadata

New York – 31st August 2010 – Panvidea™, a global leader in on-demand video encoding, preparation, processing and distribution for entertainment and advertising content across any digital platform, has today announced that Broadcast Interactive Media (BIM) has selected Panvidea’s Cloud-based video processing solution to power an enhanced version of the BIMVid™ video content management system as well as the YouNews™ social media platform.

BIM is the leading provider of locally-focused content, advertising and technical solutions for television, newspaper and radio websites. With the BIMVid system, clients can publish video anywhere with a web connection, easily edit clips and select a specific frame to display as the story image, and track all content and video assets. YouNews, BIM’s social media platform, allows community members to upload videos, photos and stories to local media websites for use on-air or for cross-targeting elsewhere online. The platform delivers revenue opportunities, local and national contesting, national content exchange, plus content moderation.

BIM and its customers will be able to benefit from a broadcast-ready feature set that has already attracted the attention of major clients including A&E Television Networks, Fox Broadcasting Company and Getty Images. Panvidea provides the only instantly scalable, cloud-based solution to encode digital media elements, manage relevant metadata, edit and transform media for multiple audiences, and supply content as digital products to any platform or device.
 
The combined solutions from BIM and Panvidea will allow local broadcasters and individual community members to upload local video content from any location via integrated applications or a standard web-based interface. The system will automatically transform the content to the correct publishing format and package the metadata for online distribution. The move to Panvidea promises to provide BIM’s clients and individual contributors with significantly improved performance, faster publishing time, enhanced security, and superior video quality.
 
“We looked at the market and determined that no other on-demand video processing solution supports as wide a range of professional formats, post-production operations and video workflow tools,” said Nate Leaf, Director of Business Development at Broadcast Interactive Media. “The Panvidea platform will help us reduce our costs and deliver a better service to our customers.”

“The combination of BIM’s flexible web and video content management system with Panvidea’s next generation video post production and encoding solution promises to make it faster and easier for local news providers to provide their audiences with relevant, up-to-the-minute video features,” said Chris Cali, co-founder and CEO of Panvidea. “We are proud to be a part of their solution.”

About Panvidea:

Panvidea is a global leader in the preparation, processing and distribution of professional entertainment and advertising content across any digital platform. Originally founded as mPOINT in November 2007, the company re-branded in Spring 2010 with co-founder Chris Cali as CEO, to become Panvidea. Panvidea provides the only instantly scalable, on-demand solution to encode digital media elements, manage relevant metadata, edit and transform media for multiple audiences, and supply content as digital products to any platform or device. Panvidea’s secure software service eliminates the need for professional content companies to incur significant capital expenditures or pay exorbitant hourly fees to prepare their content for internal use or external digital distribution.

About Broadcast Interactive Media:

Broadcast Interactive Media is the leading provider of locally-focused advertising, content and technical solutions for television, radio, and newspaper websites. Since acquiring TitanTV Media in February 2010, BIM’s offerings have expanded to encompass powerful data tools and management solutions. Core products are the BIMVid and TitanCast video systems, YouNews social media platform, MediaStar suite, TitanTV Guide, BIM Local Ad Network, local sales initiatives such as Healthy Living and Green, and STELA Compliance Tools. Customers include ABC, Belo Television Group, Capitol Broadcasting, CBS Television, Fisher Communications, Fox Television, Gannett Broadcasting, Hearst-Argyle, NBC LIM and Scripps-Howard. BIM is based in Madison, WI with offices in New York City, Cedar Rapids, IA and Austin, TX. Connect with BIM at http://twitter.com/bimlocal or http://twitter.com/younews.

Press enquiries:

Doug Heise, dheise@panvidea.com, +1 212-967-9613 ext. 8618

Posted in News |

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Panvidea Announces WebM Support

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

Panvidea Supports WebM Open Media Project

Panvidea Supports Enhanced VP8 Codec Support as Part of its Instantly Scalable Cloud Video Encoding and Distribution Service

New York – 26th August 2010 – Panvidea™, a global leader in on-demand video encoding, preparation, processing and distribution for entertainment and advertising content across any digital platform, has today announced broad and comprehensive support for Google’s new WebM project, along with Adobe, Microsoft, and more than forty other publishers, software and hardware vendors. The new WebM open web media format, based on the VP8 open source video codec, is immediately available to all users of Panvidea’s cloud based video encoding and processing service at no additional charge as part of the company’s already extensive list of the highest quality video and audio codecs and containers.

WebM is an open, royalty-free media file format designed specifically for online video distribution. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec developed by On2 Technologies, a leading video compression firm acquired by Google in 2009.

The VP8 codec delivers high-quality video while efficiently adapting to varying processing and bandwidth conditions across a broad range of devices. It is highly bandwidth efficient and has low storage requirements, making it attractive for publishers looking to reduce costs and expand licensing opportunities for their content. The format strives for simplicity, making it easy to integrate into existing environments and easy to fine tune for the highest possible output quality.

WebM is designed to be a free alternative to the proprietary formats that dominate video on the web today – especially H.264. WebM is 100% free, and open-sourced under a BSD-style license. The introduction of the royalty-free WebM format has already had a significant impact on the online content market. As more companies – including most of the major web browsers – embrace the format, the owners of other formats are increasing starting to embrace open standards as well. One recent example is MPEG LA’s recent decision to offer a royalty-free license for the popular H.264 video codec for video sites that offer free video streams to consumers.

“We are very excited to be able to announce our support for the WebM initiative,” said Chris Cali, co-founder and CEO of Panvidea. “As online video becomes more pervasive and more professional, developers need to be able to select from a wide variety of high quality formats – both open source and proprietary.  We believe that the WebM project, with its emphasis on openness and will make it even easier for publishers of all shapes and sizes to distribute video content of the highest possible quality. We think that’s a good thing for the industry and we are pleased to be able to offer WebM video encoding to our customers.”

Panvidea already provides comprehensive support with full codec parameter control for all major TV, VoD, web & mobile formats. Panvidea’s built-in intelligence and instantly scalable cloud video encoding engine automatically determines the best way to produce the highest quality results in the fastest possible time.

“Panvidea leads the industry with regard to scalability, cost efficiency, batch processing capabilities, and workflow automation for professional content owners,” said Cali. “Adding support for Google’s WebM format only adds to the strengths of our service offering.”

For more information on the WebM project, please visit the following site: www.webmproject.org/.

About Panvidea:

Panvidea is a global leader in the preparation, processing and distribution of professional entertainment and advertising content across any digital platform. Originally founded as mPOINT in November 2007, the company re-branded in Spring 2010 with co-founder Chris Cali as CEO, to become Panvidea. Panvidea provides the only instantly scalable, on-demand solution to encode digital media elements, manage relevant metadata, edit and transform media for multiple audiences, and supply content as digital products to any platform or device. Panvidea’s secure software service eliminates the need for professional content companies to incur significant capital expenditures or pay exorbitant hourly fees to prepare their content for internal use or external digital distribution. For more information visit http://www.panvidea.com/

Press enquiries:

Doug Heise, dheise@panvidea.com, +1 212-967-9613 ext. 8618

Posted in News |

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Accelerating Pace of Online Innovation Threatens Traditional Hollywood Distribution Windows

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

Several significant media news stories have emerged in the last month that grabbed my attention and really drove home the extent to which Hollywood’s traditional distribution windows are being shattered.

The first, and perhaps most intriguing of these stories,  focused on the desire of several major studios (including Disney) to make new movies available to cable and satellite TV operators as early as 30 to 60 days after their theatrical debuts – for a premium price. The second involved the deal between NetFlix and the recently launched EPIX pay TV channel  allowing Netflix to stream feature films from Paramount, MGM and Lionsgate 90 days after they debut on the premium pay-tv and subscription VOD services. Finally, proponents of the cable TV industry’s “TV Everywhere” approach have upped the ante by announcing that at least seven of the ten largest subscription-TV providers in the U.S. are planning to launch new tablet-computer applications in the next six months that will provide mobile access to premium pay content from HBO and other providers.

Now, it must be pointed out that each of these initiatives come with some significant caveats. For example, the studios are proposing to charge a whopping $25-$50 for “premium” VOD content, Netflix’s new content will be SD only and will lack contributions from many premium content owners like HBO, and cable’s tablet app offers will, of course, only be available to existing cable subscribers.

Despite these limitations, the announcement of so many paradigm breaking initiatives in a single month, demonstrates that the pace of innovation in online media has accelerated to such a degree that traditional distribution windows are quite close to disappearing altogether. Although the various industry players seem to be pursuing very different philosophies and approaches, it is clear that the major content providers and publishers have realized that they can no longer afford to take a wait and see approach to adopting new platforms and formats. Action must be taken today to meet a large and growing demand for immediately available online and mobile content – and traditional video processing platforms are just not up to the challenge.

The Hollywood practice of media release windows – with prescribed time gaps between which films and television shows are aired over different media – has remained largely unchanged for several decades. Films are launched with a theatrical release, followed after a few months by a home video release. Once the retail market is served, films  gradually make their way to VOD, Pay-per-view, and hospitality markets, before finally making their way to premium cable. Last on the list is basic cable and broadcast TV.

Hollywood’s adherence to these traditional distribution windows and the business models that go along with them has meant that emerging online video providers such as NetFlix, iTunes, Hulu, or Amazon OnDemand have struggled to provide their viewers with premium content and often cannot get a popular movie or TV show until long after it has been shown on pay TV or been made available on DVD.

But as an increasing number of video consumers reject traditional pay channels or DVDs in favor of online and mobile video, content owners have had to contend with growing consumer frustration over the lack of premium content online. A vocal minority of viewers is unwilling to wait months for a favorite show to make it online and many are willing to pursue illegal options to obtain the content.

When you combine this with the threat of competition from YouTube and recently resurgent Web-only content companies such as Next New Networks, My Damn Channel, or Michael Eisner’s Vuguru, it is clear that a shift is taking place.

According to the measurement firm comScore, 86 percent of Internet users in the United States now watch at least one online video a month.  In the month of July 2010, 178 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content during the month for an average of 14.7 hours per viewer. As more video is available online, it is becoming the defacto video source for a growing number of viewers, particularly those in younger demographics.

As these initiatives show, Hollywood and the cable industry is feeling the winds of change and are beginning to take some steps to respond. Obviously, this isn’t the first time that Hollywood has experimented with radical changes to its traditional windows. Back in 2006, director Steven Soderbergh worked out a deal with Mark Cuban of Landmark Theatres and HDNet to simultaneously release his low budget indie film, Bubble, to theatre screens and cable TV simultaneously – with a DVD release a few days later.  But this experiment – which significantly did not include an online release – was only a drop in the bucket compared to what’s happening today.

But what does this mean to content owners and publishers. Well, for one thing, it means that content repurposing for the web or mobile devices can no longer be seen as an afterthought. Producers will need to factor in the costs and difficulties of multi-platform distribution right from the start. It also shortens the time frame available for video processing. Content owners will not have the luxury of taking months to prepare content. Finally, content owners will need to be prepared to support a much broader range of platforms and formats – at least in the near term.

In an environment such as this – where response time, cost, scalability and quality are all critical factors – traditional server based solutions are not going to work. They are too expense, too hard to scale, and too expensive to maintain. Likewise, traditional service providers such as post production houses – which are tied to highly manual, craft-based processes and expensive in-house data centers – are unable to respond in a cost effective manner. Only a cloud based provider will be able to meet the requirements of the new distribution model.  And, we believe, only Panvidea can meet the quality and scalability requirements of professional media.

Posted in Blog |

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