This time is different because we have eyes right at the source, 5,000 feet below the ocean floor. This official live feed (below), being delivered ship-to-shore using VBrick video streaming technology, has been made available to the general public and to independent scientific entities. This video and others makes it possible for more accurate calculations of the spill’s intensity–from the initial estimates by BP of roughly 5,000 barrels a day, to what scientists now believe may be 25,000 barrels per day.

No one argues that this might be the worst oil related catastrophe the United States has ever faced, but access to real-time video from depths lethal to humans, has enabled decision makers to deploy the 2000 on-locations responders, 75 boats, and 45+ miles of containment booms in a manner that will have the most impact –they now know they are fighting a monster five time the size.

The public also has a better understanding of the magnitude of the spill and the Government can respond more proactively while the crisis is still happening. This is in part to this live video feed and other VBrick high-definition video feeds being made available from aircraft and sea-going vessels.

More on that next week.

For more information about Mission Critical Video and how the Gulf Oil Spill Live Feed works technically please check out the vbrick.com website

Modern Media Transport will consist of the fragmented MP4 file format, the H.264 video codec, HTTP delivery, and a standard way to signal bitrate adaptation from the client. The goal is to use standard web servers and HTTP caches for delivery. Apple made a mistake with their .TS file implementation as part of their HTTP streaming scheme because it puts thousands of little files on disk that become impossible to manage. Microsoft got it right with their implementation of the MP4 container with fragmented chunks that can be stored within it. Apple got it right to implement adaptation with a file from a standard web server that provides the switching options to the client. I would have preferred the use of SMIL which is another standard that both Microsoft and Apple have supported before rather than the .M3U8 playlist that Apple used. I believe that Microsoft should give up on the idea of making their implementation dependent upon IIS and adopt the same file format for bitrate adaptation.

This standardization effort and the strong support of it by both Microsoft and Apple will help the industry that has been weakened by proprietary codecs, formats, and streaming protocols. If all goes well, this standard will be implemented by both Microsoft IE and Apple Safari to support the video tag of HTML5. Both should cover the MPEG license for H.264 playback in IE and Safari. Content creators will be able to encode one file and know that it will work on any Apple or Microsoft system without any extra browser plug-ins.

I think that any effort by Microsoft and Apple to create a common standard will have been influenced by their mutual desire to thwart both Adobe and Google. Google’s purchase of On2 and subsequent open source announcement for VP8 presents a new challenge to these web video standards. However, a bigger opportunity exists for Microsoft and Apple if they can find a common way to support the distribution of premium media content. Imagine buying a movie on iTunes on Windows 7 and being able to play it on both your XBox and your iPad! Disney’s KeyChest technology might make something like this possible.

Not a lot of information exists about the MMT standard online. For now, stay tuned to the MPEG.org site, or email me directly if you would like to learn more: erikh (at) vbrick.com.

Big stories will often draw swarms of reporters, broadcast trucks, helicopters, and eye-witness reports. Usually, whoever gets the story first tends to hold on to that story, which makes it vital to have the tools that let you get the air first. But sending out and setting up satellite truck is timely, and minutes make the difference. So, how do you bridge the gap and gain the competitive edge? You go mobile.

This year at NAB VBrick introduced a Mobile Broadcasting System (MBS) that provides a back-packed sized kit for broadcasting real-time audio and video back to the studio using mobile phone providers data networks. Leveraging 3G and 4G technology, the MBS allows a reporter and camera to go live within minutes of arriving on the scene of a story. In fact the MBS allows reporters to go on-air en route, and from places that broadcast trucks can’t get to.

It is because of this innovation that TV Technology magazine gave the Mobile Broadcasting System it’s STAR Award at National Association of Broadcasters Tradeshow this year.

Sprint has a 1 Mbps upload cap and the service is “best effort” which means that your upload bitrate could degrade if many users are uploading at the same time via the same cell tower. However 1 Mbps is enough to send very high quality video that is encoded from the VBrick H.264 appliance.

I plan to demonstrate this with Sprint at their technology exposition at the Las Vegas Wynn hotel during the National Association of Broadcasters show. This will be from 4pm to 6pm each day during NAB. I will be at the VBrick booth (SL3309) showing off the product from 9am to 3pm each day as well. Please drop by and check it out if you are at NAB next week!

The power of video is indisputable, in fact people have come to expect it on your website, and everyone is in a race to get video on theirs. Now, I suggest that you turn it up a notch – go live! While everyone else is thinking about the next kitschy video that they hope will go viral, think about adding true value to your website and start doing live webcasts, live webinars, live product demonstrations. You’ll catch the competition of guard and your customers will love you.

Rich-media presentations that incorporate live video, presentations, and interactive elements give your viewers a sense of participation and will help you build a community. BONUS – You can record all of your live sessions and make them available for later viewing. You get the best of both worlds.

The VBoss team (VBrick’s Online Streaming Service) and I have been screaming about this from the top of mountains lately because we have seen what it is already doing for our customers. Soon, it is going to be even easier for you to broadcast live directly from your PC, from virtually anywhere, and provide great value to your audience.

Now Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and Microsoft IE9 will all soon support the native playback of H.264 video which will greatly increase the adoption of this standard and simplify the way publishers distribute their video.

Today most people think of the quarterly “CEO all hands meeting” as a significant event. People gather in large meeting rooms, fly to headquarters, or launch a browser-based webcasting application to tune in. It is a broadcast with limited feedback and is often costly to produce. However, being able to simultaneously reach everyone with a message is valuable, especially for companies with tens of thousands of employees that are distributed globally.

For IT it is usually a nightmare. I used to produce these quarterly CEO events and they were always very stressful. Distributing live streaming video and PowerPoint of the CEO to thousands of employees across a global corporate network is a big production. Setting aside the microphone and lighting issues, last-minute changes to the slides, and the curious spectators who trip over your cables, the network usually takes a big hit and IT tends to panic. It is the one, very rare, time that IT is supporting something that is more important than the CEO being able to surf the Internet and fetch email – it is the CEO live on video and every employee is watching!

When they fail (and they often do with the wrong approach) they are usually written off as “a cutting edge experiment by a forward-thinking CEO” who will try it again next year when the technology is more mature. Many of these events are being produced successfully. It is then that IT really starts to panic. The CEO now wants to do these every month and every VP wants to have their own webcast. I recall working with a company that had 200 VPs and each had their own annual webcast event. I know of several companies who now produce hundreds of live webcast events every year. The technology has arrived and a few companies like VBrick have figured out how to make this work.

Still the cost and complexity of webcast events prevent them from being used frequently despite the effectiveness of video as a communication medium. This is why enterprise video needs to be organized as channels rather than events. Channels can be live broadcasts, simulated live re-broadcasts, or even feeds of small on-demand presentations that can be consumed as time permits. The difference is that these need to be “always on” with the assumption that stakeholders will be able to tune in at any time to consume the content.

Rather than producing complicated events or “virtual destinations” (online conference rooms, portal pages, applications, archives, or video URLs) these channels will be a simple way to join content “in progress”. All that IT needs to worry about is changing the source of the video which could be a video conferencing endpoint, studio, or even a web camera. The distribution infrastructure must be provisioned ahead of time (with IP Multicast enabled and reflectors as needed for non-multicast links) and active at all times for each channel. This model allows production to be reduced to self provisioning and ad hoc technical support as needed. The easiest implementation is to have a small corporate studio that allows any one to walk in and switch the video source from a loop of corporate training or HR videos to the camera source. Call this “Company Channel One”. Once you are comfortable with one channel, you can add more for TV distribution over IP and then new categories of corporate content. These “always on” channels will not have a negative impact on the network if they are properly deployed.

The next step is to put these video channels in front of your stakeholders. Again, rather than asking them to leave their workspace to join scheduled events, you should embed these video channels into their everyday business applications. The most popular “always on” application is the instant messaging software (chat application) which is now a standard part of business productivity software for most enterprises. VBrick has released our IBM SameTime Plug-in which allows one-click access to live and stored video from within this application.

Next, we plan to release an integration with the widely popular Microsoft instant messaging client. We announcedour interest in Microsoft’s Unified Communications platform back in October with the addition of Microsoft’s Vice President of Unified Communications, Gurdeep Pall, to our board of advisors. Our vision is to create “VBrick Video Buddies” for Office Communicator. These “bots” will represent VBrick channels providing presence information about what programs are currently available in each channel and allow users to be one-click away from these live channels via the Contact Context Window. This integration promises to go beyond the utility of the SameTime plug-in as Microsoft embeds these presence capabilities into all of their business productivity applications. This means that these VBrick video channels can be in front of your business stakeholders at all times.

These innovations, built upon the industry-leading VBrick infrastructure, will transform enterprise video from a costly IT nightmare to an affordable and effective way to communicate with substantial impact and unlimited reach.

VBrick supports the H.264 standard and is happy to see more clarity from the MPEG LA regarding its licensing terms. With Apple and Google’s native support of H264 video as part of their HTML5 implementation in the Safari and Chrome browsers as well as their native H264 support on both the iPhone/iPad and Android mobile devices, the adoption of H264 for Internet video will accelerate. Microsoft has indicated general support for native video rendering in the browser via the HTML5 standard while not yet revealing how it will be implemented. I suspect that Microsoft, which already is both a MPEG LA licensor and licensee of H.264, will support it with the HTML5 video tag in the next release of Internet Explorer. Microsoft has already provided support of H.264 and HTML5 for the delivery of video to the iPhone from their IIS web server and has some support for H.264 in Windows 7.

H.264 provides a singular, standard, and widely adopted way to reach all “three screens” (TV, PC, and mobile) with one source of streaming video. This dramatically reduces the cost and complexity for publishers and consumers alike. VBrick will continue to support this standard with innovative products and services.

Here is an example of what VEMS embedded into SharePoint via the Page Viewer Web Part:

To embed VEMS in a  SharePoint site as a site administrator, simply create or edit any page then click “Site Actions”, then “Edit Page”, then “Add Web Part” and select “Page Viewer Web Part”. Once your Web Part is on the page, click “Modify Shared Web Part”. You will then be able to pick “Web Page” and provide the VEMS URL that you want to embed into Sharepoint.

There are some advanced options including setting the size of the embedded Web Part that are useful if you are embedding a VEMS video player page as well. Finally, I recommend that you enable the Single Sign-on feature of VEMS so that the user credentials can be shared from your company’s Active Directory across both the SharePoint site and the VEMS pages that are embedded within it.

Today our customers can leverage VBrick Professional Services team to configure their VEMS and SharePoint systems to work  together. We take a formal “Project Management” approach to make sure that your deployment will be a success. Since VBrick relies upon both SharePoint and VEMS for our own internal corporate communications needs, we have substantial experience with bringing these systems together.

We plan to develop an even tighter integration with SharePoint and with Office Communicator so that adding VBrick-powered video infrastructure to Microsoft applications is easy and so that employees can be one-click away from great video content. Keep on eye on this space.