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.

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