Reliable Encoding Platforms for Digital Media Startups

In the realm of the digital media startup, when it comes to the difference between a successful new venture and a failed one, concept and execution of content remain – quite obviously – paramount. But for those digital startups that depend on transmitting large quantities of visual content to their users in a live, moment-by-moment fashion, there is an added need: they must find the proper digital encoding platform, ideally one with the necessary compression to allow for high-speed, high-definition A/V services.

One particularly interesting case example would be the Duke University campus-founded startup, Radius. As the company’s CTO, David Herzka, describes the overall Radius concept: “Radius allows users to attach digital files to a specific location… For example, a dance group on [a college] campus can set up a beacon [from its current location], post multimedia content online and people walking nearby can retrieve the information with their smartphones.”

Sounds like a pretty great concept for a company, right? Absolutely and without hesitation. That being said, in order that tomorrow’s livestreaming digital media companies retain their competitive edge, there are practical issues to consider and navigate through, one of them being what kind of encoding system to use. Making sure that a livestreaming video performs as advertised (i.e. moment-by-moment) is an absolute must. In a recent survey conducted by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the conclusion is frank and stark: “viewers have little patience for videos that don’t start immediately… For every additional one second wait, the abandonment rate goes up by nearly six percent.” In short, what good can great, live content amount to if the delivery system is slow to start, or transmitted in a “stuttered” manner? Given that your average, neighborhood startup has limited financial resources to spare – and given that everything depends on user-friendly functionality for it to be successful – the livestreaming must come off without a hitch or glitch.

At Telairity, our low-cost, high-speed encoding systems allow for just that sort of reliability. Whether you want to stream via mobile and/or otherwise, our H.264 platforms allow for interface with just about any type of device on the market. If you’re a startup that’s looking to help usher in the livestreaming phenomenon and take advantage of a massive potential user-base, you can’t choose any better than to choose working with a company like Telairity.

An Ivy League in Every Home: the Live-Streaming of University Classes Worldwide

It’s simply a given that a large percentage of the top-ranked colleges and universities in the world are located in the United States. With perennial powerhouses like MIT and Harvard University vying for the coveted “#1 spot”, the quality of top-tier education has, in some degree, never been healthier than it is now. As evidence of this fierce competitiveness, a “building boom” of sorts is happening among Ivy League and other renowned American institutions of higher learning, all of which seem to be in friendly competition with each other in attracting a larger percentage of the global student body. Cornell University, for example, is slated to open a new Manhattan-based campus that focuses on developing technology directly applicable to entrepreneurial business. Yale University has developed a joint program (and a sprawling new campus) in conjunction with the National University of Singapore. Duke University is set to open a new business administration campus in Kunshan, China come 2014.

But while these universities are making inroads into cities across the Middle East and East Asia, all of them bristling with new, state-of-the-art campuses geared for the high-end needs of elite global students, another and different sort of program is taking shape in Cambridge, MA. A partnership between MIT and Harvard University that’s dubbed “edX”, the program seeks to livestream Harvard and MIT classes onto the laptops and desktops of students across the world. These aren’t simply “recorded classes” posted online for anyone to access via YouTube. We’re talking about live, interactive web experiences for students living anywhere in the world; anywhere that has access to the necessary broadband encoding systems. Suddenly, students from Kampala to Kamchatka will have the ways and means (for a nominal fee) of receiving a truly world-class education.

Using open-source software that can be accessed at other college classrooms around the world, MIT and Harvard have contributed $30M apiece in order to make this program into reality. Here at Telairity, we make it our business to help develop and facilitate such groundbreaking new means of higher education. With our livestreaming H.264 encoding platforms and our HD graphics, we see a strong potential to help usher in a new era of trans-global learning. The world remains a vast space, to be certain. But more and more, the speed of its student body moves  at the speed of Telairity. 

Mission Completely Possible: the Coordination of Big-Budget Hollywood Productions through Livestreaming

Their audiences know them by various and iconic names: James Bond, Jason Bourne, Lara Croft, Indiana Jones – all of them globe-trotting, multi-lingual, high-kicking movie characters known the world over. What makes these characters so appealing? Well, many things of course, but part of their appeal has something to do with the fluency and ease by which they’re able to transfer between two utterly, upsettingly different locations: from the medieval alleys of a Moroccan city to the high-wire skyline of New York; sprung from the depths of some MI6 basement and into the throes of a Russian blizzard; racing just ahead of a fast-moving boulder in the depths of the Amazon, making it back (just in time!) to teach the morning archaeology class at a preeminent university.

Our culture idolizes speed, motion, fast-moving spreadsheets of skyline and vista. We love the wild closeness all distances share with each other. This love of ours has always been embodied by the Hollywood characters we spend our money to see time and again. We as a planet are only now, in dribs and drabs, catching up to the speed of these first, pioneering globe-trotters. With H.264 MPEG encoding technology that allows for livestreaming of enormous quantities of audio-visual data from a movie-set in, say, London to a digital production facility in Los Angeles, the lives of filmmakers are gradually assuming the dimensionless versatility of characters in a film.

Let’s say a director based in Los Angeles needs to see the results of the last three takes of a particular shot taken in London. He or she needs to decide – very quickly – which take is the “right” shot to go with. In the olden days, the director would have needed to be onset for those takes. Today, with minute-by-minute digital transmutation of vast amounts of data, the gulf between the director and his or her director’s chair has never been wider – or more irrelevant. Films can be made that much more cost-effectively and within the given timeframe of a production. There is little or no need to go into overtime when it comes to shooting a picture.

We aren’t Hollywood scriptwriters or producers here at Telairity. But what we can do is help coordinate a studio production, or a multi-studio collaborative production, in such a way as to make the experience seamless and “real” as if two different production teams shared the same space. Let us know how we can be of service. We’re quite sure Lara Croft would approve this message.