I attended last night's NY Video Meetup where HD Cloud, Mogulus, Boxee, and KickApps were showcasing various innovations. Each in detail:
- Mogulus - Demoed a very impressive live streaming product that was able to mix both an external video source and elemnts on the PC (such as a game, PowerPoint, etc). The feaure that seemed to wow the crowd was when the CEO demonstrated the ability to zoom into elements on the screen such as a chart in a presentation. The downside: Mogulus appears to use Adobe FMS for live streams, and it shows (quality/buffering/stalls, etc)
- Boxee - CEO and Co-Founder Avner demonstrated the Boxee interface and new partners in their API/ App Store program. During the Q&A section a Time Warner executive gave Avner a brief lecture on the as-is state of the industry relative to content rights. Avner listened to the comments and responded with a witty off topic "but broadband caps are mean."
- KickApps - Really impressive demo here (didn't catch the name of the demonstrator). They have created a WYSIWYG editor for video players; cool stuff.
The 4th company that presented at the event was
HD Cloud, an
Amazon Web Services based transcoding provider. The service utilizes EC2 to split a file into many parts and transcode across many Ec2 intances. In theory it seems like a good idea, but the details:
- Cost is $2 per GB transcoded
- Doesn't appear there is any IP what-so-ever; in fact anyone that has developers on staff could use FFMPEG or similar to do the same
- Security? The HD Cloud team said they anticipate handling high value content but they'll need to prove that they can secure the content outside of Amazon's existing model.
- File transfer today is done via. FTP; no Aspera or Signiant to speed AND secure delivery.
Doesn't look too good for HD Cloud, and at the prices they are charging for many it will be cheaper just to have a local transcode solution in their data center.
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