lower thirds

NBCOlympics.com; Unprecedented

I've had the privilege of working with Digital Rapids this past month, helping them publicize their role in the Olympic Games from Beijing. A little background, NBC is a long-standing customer of Digital Rapids and have been using their encoding technologies for many years.  

Earlier this year, Digital Rapids announced that NBC had chosen them to provide all the encoding technology for the more than 2200 hours of live streaming content that would come out of this event.  And even though I've been working in this space since the 90s, I didn't realize the significance of what was going on here until I sat down with the execs from Digital Rapids and heard their story.  Online video has reached such ubiquity nowadays, that we tend to forget what's happening behind the scenes to create a high quality online viewing experience.  So much so that you might think that this year's Summer Olympic Games in Beijing is just another online event.  

Well, that's very far from the truth.  In fact, a live event such as the Olympics, with this many sporting events, talking heads interviews, side bar commentary (to name a few), adds up to literally hundreds of simultaneous live streams, in multiple formats and multiple bit rates and served up to a potential audience of 210 million Internet users in the US along -- it's quite staggering!  And the stakes are tremendous for NBC.

So we were fortunate enough to share our story with some pretty influential people in the press and blogosphere.  Here's their take on what's going on:

Between the Lines (ZDNet), Tom Steinert-Threlkeld

Network World, Jason Meserve

GeekBrief, Cali Lewis

We hope to have more stories to share next week, I'll be sure to post them here.

A New Avid

I've been following the blogosphere's reaction to the messages coming from Avid lately, specifically, a letter from Avid CEO Gary Greenfield. 

 Last January, I read with great interest about the "New Thinking" campaign and honestly my first thought was, 'is this purely PR without real management commitment and substance behind it?'  I spoke with a lot of friends and colleagues in the space about it, and everyone was hopeful and optimistic.  Avid was hitting on all the points users wanted to hear, and had been waiting to hear from a long time.  

I also have a lot of friends at Avid -- even in my old days at Media 100, when we competed fiercely with Avid, I always respected the Company and admired their leadership in the industry.  But in truth, I also always felt there was somewhat of a disconnect between the Company and their users.

But this new effort (with new leadership/management), is working very hard to eliminate those disconnects and better communicate with customers.  That's a tremendous undertaking and I applaud management for their efforts to date.  "New Thinking" was dubbed a "campaign," and in my world, that means marketing.  But it's becoming quite clear to me that this is not a campaign, but a true shift in strategy for their business.

They're making progress, I hope it continues and I wish them all the best.