Who here remembers the good old View-Master? How
about family vacation slides on a slide projector?
Come on, put your hands up at the back, don’t be embarrassed.
Okay, I’m dating myself, but the point is there are
always
current and
future emerging technologies driven by personal and home entertainment
needs.
In today’s context, the advent of online videos
has dramatically compressed the time between technologies and increased
our options.
The result is not only the lack of a central
point or
device to view videos but the advancement of anywhere, any time and any
business model fuelled by the marketplace.
Format Wars Forever
In his recent article “Format Wars Forever,”
Damien Stolarz does a nice job of outlining the history of warring
formats. It’s an informative, short read that is
well worth your
time. Here’s the gist:
Unlike the days of format
standardization which
created a mass market for $20 DVD players, online video players are
simply software. As such, just about any savvy programmer can
now
create their own software video player for any PC or mobile
device.
Additionally, beyond the indispensable codec, it’s
the varied
business
and distribution models that also steer this
process.
Consequently,
both time proven broadcast methods and fixed price models are no longer
enough to satisfy the content providers, grown-ups on an air plane or
teens on the go with their modern day View Master, iPod, smart phone,
Playstation Portable, PC or HDTV.
He describes this as a
“rich,
exciting and utterly unstable environment for online content
distribution.”
Conclusions
My observation is that there are as many ways to monetize
content as
there are different end user devices for consumption.
This
speaks to
RipCode’s mission to enable each of these countless streams
over
various networks, codecs, players and devices without crippling
existing storage or transcoding infrastructure.
While the guys at
RipCode
can’t get the world to standardize on one common codec, frame
size or
bitrate, they can and will generate these requested files on demand via
RipCode
V4—anything,
anywhere, any screen.
As a consumer, I like the variety of choices for where and how
I get
my video.
Originally written by Peter Anzalone of the RipCode Blog. RipCode offers on-demand video transcoding solutions to ease the process of re-purposing video into multiple viewing formats.
