Recent article I found on burst site:
Bursting Through Bandwidth
IVT?s Burstware Could Be Next Wave for Video Streaming
Although watching video on the Web is still a frustrating experience for the great majority of viewers, it is nonetheless
emerging as an alternative to traditional television. Bandwidth is becoming less of an issue as broadband proliferates, giving
broadcasters and content providers more reason to embrace video streaming.
San Francisco-based Instant Video Technologies (IVT) thinks it has the technology to unleash the full power of video
streaming. The company has developed Burstware, a faster-than-real-time IP delivery system for full motion audio and video,
which it calls "the next wave of technology" that "picks up where real-time streaming lets off."
TV Technology?s Associate Editor Jonathan R. Pegg spoke with IVT Chairman and CEO Richard Lang about the company,
Burstware and what the technology can do for broadcasters.
TV TECHNOLOGY: What does IVT do and what is Burstware?
LANG: We provide the next version of streaming technology for video and audio. We call this Burstware, which is client/server
software. How this differs from normal real-time streaming is it takes advantage of two major, industry trends. One of them is
emerging broadband and the other is low-cost storage, which is emerging everywhere on desktops. Burstware takes advantage
of those things by using time as a variable.
In a real-time streaming environment a server someplace is playing video across a network, and then as more people ask for
video it opens up new connections. As people ramp up, it sort of creates this curve of demand that eventually fills up the pipe
? and at the point at which the pipe is full, the pipe is full. But everything up until that point, and everything after that point,
where the pipe is less than full, is bandwidth that somebody is paying for that is not being used.
With Burstware, instead of just playing things over the network, the server has an overview of all the clients, whether they be
set-top boxes or PCs. Anytime there is excess bandwidth in the pipe, Burstware server looks at each client individually, how
quickly are they consuming the content, and what is the size of the connection. Then based on that overview, it sends a chunk
of content that is in excess of what is being watched over to the client and loads it on the client-side storage, which is really
the least-expensive piece of storage on the network.
This does two things: First, by preloading the client-side cache, it means that the server doesn?t have to devote anymore
network resources to that client in order for that client to have a viewing experience. Second, the viewing is always taking
place from the storage ? and as a result, nothing that happens on the network can affect the quality of the play; and right
now the single biggest detriment to real-time streaming is that it is essentially a remote play technology.
Burstware picks up where real-time streaming lets off. It is the next logical extension because it is using the available time and
bandwidth when it can. It is a form of download but it is a managed, configurable download. It is an intelligent resource
manager as opposed to a dumb server that is giving video or audio to whomever has the most bandwidth.
TV TECHNOLOGY: What is your target market for Burstware?
LANG: Our customers are primarily business-to-business and that is because they have the big pipes right now as well as the
budgets. Third, and more importantly, they have the need, in particular in the areas of training and customer care. There is a
tremendous amount of demand, and this logically extends into the areas of corporate communications within a company,
between its employees and management, but also from a company to its customers over intranets, but also over the Internet
as bandwidth becomes more available. We are focused on business-to-business, the financial markets, the telecom market and
applications such as training, corporate communications as well as e-commerce.
TV TECHNOLOGY: Are there applications for the broadcast or cable industries?
LANG: Definitely. We were at NAB with Virage, which is one of our partners. Virage?s Videologger is being bundled with
Burstware. Videologger is able to find specific areas of video that are archived and then Burstware does the delivery. We are a
delivery mechanism; we are not a compression mechanism. We are completely neutral to the type of compression used and to
the way it is being rendered at the receiving end. We have a player, but it is not essential that it is used because we can
burst-enable other applications, like Windows Media Player.
We were with Virage at NAB, and we were discussing with a lot of companies how broadcasters and companies in the industry
have archives with tons of assets. Right now, a lot of those assets are static. They are sitting there, not useful and not
marketable. Burstware is an IP-based delivery system, and as the existence of IP networks develops producers, content
providers that have these investments already are able to make this programming available to the end user or to associates
within the field without having to invest in an inventory or a new distribution system. They are able to, once the content is
digitized, literally remarket it directly to consumers.
Typically, streaming as a distribution model has been thought of as going from a server to alternate clients. In Version 2.0,
which will be out in the fall, we are providing server-to-server content management. This is very important for broadcasters
because, once the assets are digitized and residing on a server, you don?t necessarily want to replicate that and fill up every
server on the network. You want to be able to have intelligence between servers that can replicate when necessary but also
move content around so it resides logically where it should be positioned based on the type or physical proximity to where it is
going to be used. Those are all factors that can be managed by Burstware.
TV TECHNOLOGY: Could broadcasters use this technology to stream video through their Web sites?
LANG: Certainly. Right now there are broadband portals emerging, and the point of going to one of these portals is that you
know the bandwidth is there. People with cable modems, DSL lines can hit a broadband portal and connect directly to the
archived materials.
TV TECHNOLOGY: Do you expect the proliferation of cable modems will help you push into this market?
LANG: It will, but even more important will be DSL lines. Phone service is everywhere ? you may or may not have cable, but
you?ve got a phone. There is also wireless DSL starting to emerge. For us, they are all winners ? we benefit from all of these.
Anywhere more bandwidth becomes available to the end user is good for us.
Anytime that the size of the pipe is bigger than the rate at which the content is encoded you have the opportunity to burst. If
you have content that is encoded at 14.4 kbps on the Web site, but the connection is 28.8 [kbps] you could do one of two
things: You could play two 14.4 programs in that space or you can take the content that?s encoded at 14.4 and, if it lasts 10
minutes, you can actually send it in five.
By doing that, as the content provider, you are actually deriving the benefit by preloading it, by sending it faster than it is
going to be consumed, of giving the customer the ability to view it locally. No matter what happens on the network, they are
insulated from it and, second, as a content provider you want to know that you can send as much content as possible through
that bandwidth you are paying for without seeing it go by unused. It is giving you the network management tool to get the
most for the money you are paying for bandwidth.
TV TECHNOLOGY: Explain the Partners Program and what you hope this will do for IVT.
LANG: Burstware is a platform for delivering audio and video. But most companies that are not already in this business but have
content they want to put on a network are not just looking for a delivery mechanism. They want to know how to get this video
on the network, how to encode it, how to bill for that ? things like that.
The Burstware Partners Program is designed to attract the best companies in each area that can complement and provide other
parts of the solution that may not already be there for a customer. Encoding is a perfect example. Burstware is the delivery
mechanism. We can give you the CD and deliver video, but you can?t deliver it unless it is physically loaded onto your network
on a server somewhere.
That requires encoding, and since we don?t do encoding, we are neutral to it. We can provide one or more partners ?
InnovaCom is one that does it in hardware, Digital OutPost does it in software ? and through them our customer can feel
comfortable that they don?t have to go out and shop around to get the other pieces. With the Partners Program we are
providing all the pieces for an end-to-end solution.
TV TECHNOLOGY: Why should broadcasters care about what you are doing?
LANG: Ultimately everybody is going to be distributing electronically. The notion of cassettes is going to disappear. Not
overnight, but eventually. Between broadcasters and advertisers, there is a perfect example of a business-to-business
application: ad insertion. If you are going to insert ads into local programming, why would you not use the communications
broadband infrastructure that is emerging? Why would you choose to send programming via FedEx at great time delays and
expense?
If you go with the assumption that you, as a broadcaster, are going to end up like the rest of the world utilizing the Web, then
you want to make sure the technology you are investing in is not the tail end of the first wave, but rather the beginning of the
next wave of technology. That is really what Burstware represents. It is fundamentally using time as a variable, enabling us to
stream not at a steady, static rate but faster or even slower ? whichever may be optimal in order to get the most out of the
network. The point at which broadcasters are investing in distribution over networks, they certainly want to make sure they are
not investing in the old technology. Real-time streaming was never designed to operate in a broadband environment where you
have lots of storage; it is designed for a constrained bandwidth environment.
TV TECHNOLOGY: Who do you see as your competitors?
LANG: At one time we thought of Microsoft and RealNetworks. But we?ve found we can burst-enable their players [and] make
them look better, and now we view them as potential allies or customers. In terms of pure competition, because of the network
management aspects of what we do, the closest one would be Cisco?s IPTV. But the difference is that because they are never
sending content faster than real time at any point, they are still not using that extra variable of time. The way that Cisco
approaches network management is by over-provisioning the network. They are actually gobbling up more bandwidth than is
already being wasted just to have more options on how they route the traffic. In our case, we are doing exactly the opposite.
We are getting more out of the bandwidth than what is already there.
TV TECHNOLOGY: Where would you like to be in five years?
LANG: We would like to see Burstware remain widely accessible, so that anybody with content ? whether you have a market of
20 people or 20 million people ? can have access to the content delivery technology. You can be your own producer. Right
now if you have a tape that has 200 people as your market, Internet or not, you are out of luck. No one is going to host your
content. But with Burstware, you have an opportunity to distribute your information. We want to let individual artists distribute
their content. Because Burstware does not depend on a player, you only need to put it on your server and Burstware enables
whatever player you may have on your desktop or set-top box, and you are ready to go. |
