VBrick Eyes Live, Practical Streaming With VBoss
Streaming Media Magazine by Bill Greenwood April 2008
These days, most of the attention on online video focuses on its use as an entertainment medium, but its more practical applications should not be ignored, he said. It is for this reason that the company has developed the VBoss service, which is designed to give users all the tools they need to broadcast live video over the internet.
“We’ve really made it useful by taking video out of the exclusive realm of entertainment and putting it into corporate use, educational use, and, additionally, for entertainment,” Mavrogeanes said.
He said the service will allow corporate users to stream live meetings and conferences while educational users will be able to stream school events, such as sports games that may not be shown anywhere else. Mavrogeanes also said he expects VBoss users to stream events such as weddings and funerals that some family members may not be able to attend.
“What VBoss really allows is it allows everybody to become a live video publisher,” he said. “Where live video used to be very complicated, difficult, and expensive, we’ve made it inexpensive, simple, and reliable.”
A ‘Complete’ Service
VBoss includes a VBrick appliance, bandwidth, storage space, an online portal, and advertising and monetization options. According to Mavrogeanes, it’s a one-stop shop for those who wish to broadcast live video over the internet.
“It differentiates itself because it is complete,” he said, adding that many other streaming video companies may not provide any bandwidth services and don’t provide the encoder.
“Everything else requires you to source something elsewhere,” he said. “It’s truly the only complete service, and I think it’s also the simplest because of the VBrick appliance. You’ll never have an encoder. The last thing you want in a live event is for the encoder to crash, and that’s not possible with a VBrick.”
Those who subscribe to VBoss will receive the VBrick encoder in the mail and can then set up their portal with a web-based tool, which allows users to decide whether they would like advertisements to be displayed on their landing pages and whether they would like to make their videos available on a pay-per-view basis. Users purchase bandwidth on a “gas tank model,” Mavrogeanes said, meaning they will pay for a certain amount of users and bandwidth in advance and can purchase more when that amount is used up.
“That’s much better than the traditional CDN model of, ‘OK, you’re going to make this commitment,’ and then you have overage charges, and you really can’t predict what’s going to happen,” he said. “This is more like what publishers and consumers expect. It’s a little easier for people to understand how it’s priced.”
Partnerships
Mavrogeanes said VBrick has partnered with several CDN providers, most notably Akamai, to provide bandwidth to VBoss users. Akamai’s Stream OS service will be used for large, bandwidth-intensive events while other services, including PowerStream, will be used for smaller streams.
“If the video distribution was intended to be very, very high, like a million viewers, we would put you on an Akamai backbone, for example,” Mavrogeanes said. “If it were fewer viewers, we’d put you on a different backbone, a different CDN. So, we have multiple CDNs that we work with to provision the service depending upon your needs.”
VBrick has also partnered with Microsoft for its Silverlight user interface, which will power VBoss. Mavrogeanes said Silverlight will give VBoss the platform independence needed “so we operate the same way on a Windows machine as we do on a Mac, Power PC, Intel, Safari, IE [Internet Explorer], Firefox.”
How to Get It
VBoss was unveiled at this year’s Nati
VBrick Eyes Live, Practical Streaming With VBoss
http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=10245
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