AV STREAMING

There are already several companies in the professional AV industry — none strangers to InfoComm — that have been banging the digital video drum for several years. VBrick Systems, Accordent, Sonic Foundry, and Advanced Media Design are good examples of companies returning as InfoComm exhibitors. And all offer solutions that manage audiovisual assets.

VBrick introduced the first video bricks about a decade ago. They are simple-looking black-box devices that take analog video (and audio) in and convert it to IP data. As IP data, that media can be sent over the Internet or a corporate Intranet to another video brick somewhere else in the building or in the world, where it will then be converted back to analog video for display on a monitor. VBrick's early bricks were MPEG-1-based. The company now offers MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and Windows Media bricks for both higher-quality and lower-bandwidth situations.

VBrick found early success in markets such as distance education, government and military installations, as well as in the corporate world. Yet they were usually environments that had a clear need for distributing video already, or at least a vision of what was necessary. Common examples include geographically disparate educational institutions needing a way for students in a remote city or town to view a lecturer somewhere else, military bases needing live visuals from remote training exercises, or companies with multiple facilities to collaborate visually.

In order to move beyond those existing remote video needs, VBrick has built a variety of applications that use the bricks as the engine for generating video content and managing it in a manner that yields future access across an organization. For example, VBCast is family of products designed for remote or traveling creation of media streams, including VBxStream — which has the capacity for emergency units or news crews to broadcast media streams via a satellite uplink or even a cell phone. VBCast is also designed for live or archival streaming of onsite presentations. Or, more to the point of expanding the market of potential users, the new VBOSS (VBrick Online Streaming Service) bundles all of the equipment and services to afford an almost instant Internet-streaming presence.

VBPresenter is an application that links the captured live video of the presenter with the presentation slides being used by the presenter, recognizing and adjusting for the inevitable latency between the two so the viewer sees no synchronization problems. What's more, VBPresenter — in conjunction with a video-generating VBrick — is able to stream the synchronized presentation with video out over the Internet. It can also manage questions and polls from live online viewers.

It's VBrick EthernetTV that brings it all together as an infrastructure of hardware and software pieces that allow an organization to repurpose audiovisual content — whether that means training sessions, lectures, presentations, promotional material, or something else. EthernetTV provides a repository for digital media, a web-based archival and retrieval interface, a scheduling application to create broadcast or on-demand viewing, and all the hardware needed to ingest media.

Accordent Technologies focuses more directly on the creation and management of business and educational presentations. The Accordent Capture Station is a hardware and software turnkey system that records synchronized audio and video with computer-based presentation materials for live webcast streaming or archival storage. Accordent PresenterPlus affords the ability to edit, rearrange, reduce, augment, and create chapter and bookmarks within recorded presentations for future viewing.

Accordent Media Management System is an enterprise-oriented, scalable application that works in conjunction with the Capture Station to manage media content. Similar to Vbrick's EthernetTV, the Media

Related Documents:
Picture This: Tapping the Trend

http://www.svconline.com/corporateav/features/avinstall_tapping_trend/index1.html

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