Category: QCC Blog

Battery Life Makes Livecasting Short Lived — Could Fuel Cells Help?

Many pioneering videobloggers including Robert Scoble, Jeff Jarvis, Steve Garfield and Sarah Meyers are using a Nokia mobile device to stream live video to the Web. Most upload to a Web sharing platform such as QIK and Flixwagon.

Some journalists are using the phones for news gathering.

Camera phones are great, but live video streaming only goes about 30 minutes, Sarah Meyers told me in this interview.

She says that the limitation of battery life is the biggest issue facing her as a livecaster.

Fuel Cells On the Horizon for Mobile Devices

I came across this cool video piece reported by CNET’s Michael Kanellos about advances with fuel cells which will power cell phones and cameras in a year or so. The image below is a prototype Samsung Black Pearl with fuel cell attached. One of these cells will surely keep Sarah going and going and going.

— Andy Plesser

www.beet.tv

BitTorrent & Comcast are Working on Technology to “speed the delivery of video in the years to come”…..and P2P is Green!

Half of Internet traffic is carried on peer-to-peer networks. For Internet Service Providers handling this traffic, new network management technologies are being explored and implemented.

After highly publicized “throttling” of P2P traffic by Comcast and subsequent FCC inquiry and Congressional uproar, Comcast and BitTorrent have entered into a pack to to develop technology to properly manage P2P traffic. Comcast announced a separate initiative with P2P platform Pando.

Earlier this week in Manhattan at the Contentinople conference, I interview Erick Klinker, CTO of San Francisco-based BitTorrent. He explained that his company is working closely with Comcast and other ISP’s in solving network traffic issues.

The work is also future leaning. In this interview, says BitTorrent is working with ISP’s on a “new generation” technology which will “significantly speed the delivery of video in the years to come.” We didn’t get details, but this will be something to follow.

P2P is Green!

Since I interviewed Eric on April 22, Earth Day, I asked about the environmental value of P2P technology. He explained that P2P can deliver and scale the video needs of the Net without the addition of a single energy-hogging server farm.

— Andy Plesser

ScanScout Has Big Deal for Overlay Ad Implementation

ScanScout, the Boston-based ad network that has been one of the leading innovators in providing overlay advertising into video streams, has just announced a big publisher agreement with Broadband Enterprises.

Earlier this year, I interviewed Waikit Lau, ScanScout’s co-founder and CEO. Waikit gives an overview of the value of overly ads and the business proposition which is both an ad network and a white label solution.

Congrats on this big win.

— Andy Plesser

Standard Def TV Quickly Going The Way of The Dinosaur
by Rick Recco
Best buy has just announced that they will cease to sell standard definition televisions. From now on only hi-definition TV’s will be available. I expect other big chains to begin following suit rather quickly. And why not. The price of 16:9 HDTV televisions has come down drastically over the past couple of years to the point where you can get one for about the same price as a drastically inferior old style SD TV.

Case in point. I recently went into a Circuit City with the possible intention of buying a SD, (having no idea how far the prices for HD had come down.) I found a big, heavy, bulky 27 inch model for $299.99. As I kept looking I found HD’s for as low as $399.99 Needless to say I walked out of the store with a brand new, sleek, light weight Olevia 27″ HD for only $100 more then I would have paid to go old school. Now the model I bought was on sale, and you can still easily pay $1000, for a bigger unit by a bigger company, but for one third the price, the Olevia was a fantastic deal. I also looked at a 27″ Akai HD, with a built in DVD player for the same price but opted against it as I was not happy with the volume level when playing a DVD.

Standard Def, will still be around for quite awhile for the die hards, (and for those who still pay $25,000 for a used Digi-beta) but why bother. Soon enough most QC will be HD. It’s the wave of the future.

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