2008流媒体编辑之选

本文发表于2008年 流媒体行业资料手册，只要订阅就可以免费使用 流媒体 杂志. 点击 在这里 注册 .

This is the fourth edition of the 流媒体 Editors’ Picks, our annual list of the most notable products and services of the last year, and it was harder than ever to settle on which of the multitude of new products—and improvements to familiar ones—merited a spot on the list. 像往常一样, 我们调查了我们所有的固定撰稿人，征求他们的意见, 但与过去不同的是, t在这里 was nothing resembling a consensus on more than one of our eventual picks.

The funny thing was that that particular pick—Apple’s iPhone—is only partially a streaming media device; nonetheless, it was the one product that almost everyone agreed just had to be on the list, even if it’s as much for what it represents and portends for the future as it is for what it does now.

对于我们列表的其余部分, 我们没有严格的标准, 因为“流媒体”现在是一个很大的帐篷. 而, we tried to pick the best from a cross-section of entertainment and enterprise, 深度科技和消费电子产品, 制作和回放. So, without further ado (or equivocation), the 2007 Editors’ Picks.

相应的媒体管理系统
谁说老狗学不会新把戏? Accordent introduced its Media Management System in 2006, immediately boasting a roster of big-name customers like HP and JPMorganChase. In 2007, 虽然, 这个系统真正发挥了作用, furthering the move toward enterprise video convergence in spring by announcing integration with Tandberg, 宝利通, 以及其他视频会议系统, and then again in the fall by adding support for the Tandberg Content Server and Flash presentations. Add to that more robust tracking and reporting capabilities, and you’ve got an enterprise powerhouse that just keeps getting better.

adobemedia Player
2007年4月, 我在最后一刻得到了, late Friday afternoon briefing from Adobe (hastily called, 毫无疑问, when word spread that Microsoft was going to unleash Silverlight at NAB) about the company’s new media player. It sounded so cool I decided to break the nondisclosure agreement I signed and tell my 17-year-old son about it (after telling him I’d have to kill him if he told his buddies or logged on to E*TRADE in search of Adobe shares). 就像所有有自尊的青少年一样, he’d whiled away countless hours watching stupid human tricks on YouTube but 虽然t the fact that he couldn’t save Flash Video clips onto his hard drive was 很蹩脚的. When I told him that adobemedia Player would let him do just that, he responded with the ultimate teenage sign of approval: "Sweeeeeet."

当然, letting teenagers do cool things doesn’t pay the bills, but I’d venture that content publishers and advertisers had much the same response when they found out that the AMP featured digital rights management and would let them collect metrics even when the content was viewed offline. And by taking the Flash Player experience up several notches, Adobe created a media playback environment that makes all other players look, 好吧, 很蹩脚的.

苹果iPhone
关于iPhone还有什么可说的吗? 也许不是, but that only proves the point that it’s quite 简单的 the most revolutionary gadget to come down the technology pike since that other iThing was unveiled in late 2001. Except for downloading music directly from the iTunes store over Wi-Fi, the iPhone doesn’t actually do anything that other devices can’t. 它只是做那些事情——浏览网页, 阅读电子邮件, 发短信, 检查语音信箱, 是的, 看视频——比任何竞争对手都好. All of which makes it possible to overlook its shortcomings, such as the fact that it doesn’t support Flash or Flash Video (its YouTube feature only plays back H.264, al虽然 despite Steve Jobs' insistence that Flash isn't robust enough, Adobe本周宣布了这一点, 事实上, working on a version of it that'll be iPhone-compatible) and runs only on AT&T的慢速Edge网络.

这是革命性的，但并不完美. But what it does better than any of its competitors is prove that yes, 你可以用手持设备看视频, 是的, 很容易, 是的, 看起来非常漂亮. 苹果一直都知道这一点, 说到技术, 美不是肤浅的, 从光滑的, 直观的设计，以视频播放质量, iPhone很漂亮.

If you’re still not a believer, we’d guess you’ve never actually used one. At the 流媒体欧洲 show in London in October, one of our regular writers and resident skeptics was railing against the iPhone, 哀叹它所有的缺点. "I just don’t get why people are so crazy about it," he said. 然后有人递给他一个. 他一时说不出话来, after which a big smile came across his face and he said, 简单的, "Oh, 我明白了."

Elgato涡轮.264
我已经厌倦了“year of…”之类的说法, “2007年是高清年,“2008年将是移动视频年”——和所有人一样. 也就是说, it’s a pretty good bet that as we look back on 2007 in years to come, 我们会看到H的出现.264 as the closest thing to a standard as the online video world is likely to agree upon (the "format of convergence," as Digital Fountain’s Charlie Oppenheimer called it). 也就是说, 从大众市场的角度来看, it’s the one video format that consumers most often find themselves wanting or needing to use on their various devices. 这个来自埃尔加托的精巧小装置, which also makes the equally impressive EyeTV video converter/TV tuner boxes, 将硬件编码放在一个小小的USB驱动器中. Not only does that take the encoding load off of the CPU (Mac-only, 很抱歉这么说), but it also does it much faster than software-only encoding in QuickTime.