Free Product Giveaway: Six Slingbox PRO-HD Units Up For Grabs

While the industry argues over what TV Everywhere should look like, consumers like me who have a Slingbox already have a true TV Everywhere solution. With Slingbox, you can access your full linear TV lineup wherever you go from your computer or mobile device. Simply put, for TV Everywhere, nothing beats a Slingbox.

And thanks to the very generous folks at Sling Media I have six Slingbox PRO-HD units to give away to some lucky readers of my blog. I'm going to raffle off the units one at a time over the next few months so here's your chance to win the first one. Just leave one comment on this post with a valid email address saying how you will use it and I'll pick one lucky winner at random on April 1st. You must have a U.S. postal address as I will not ship these overseas. HUGE thanks to Sling Media for the boxes!

Adobe Preparing To Launch Multicasting Support For Flash

Back in October, Abobe announced a really long list of new functionality that would be supported in Flash Player 10.1, due out sometime this year. One of those features would be the long awaited support for multicasting that is essential to the way many enterprise organizations deliver video. While music, movies and game content delivered over CDNs in a unicast model still gets all the press, many Fortune 500 corporations delivering video inside their firewall have been relying on multicasting for years to support really large audiences.

One of the main reasons Microsoft still dominates the enterprise and government markets is due to their long history of having multicasting functionality. Two years ago I wrote a post talking about how I was seeing Adobe trying to push into the enterprise market to displace Microsoft, but without multicasting support in Flash, their success in the enterprise market has been limited.

Last week, I had the chance to speak to a few content owners who have been testing the multicasting capabilities in Flash and from other industry people I have spoken to, Adobe pretty much has it ready to go. The exact date Adobe plans to announce multicasting support is still unknown, but since Flash Player 10.1 is expected to be out in the first half of this year, we should expect to see multicasting support available sometime in the next three months.

Once that happens, it will be interesting to see how Adobe targets the enterprise vertical and if they can take any share away from Microsoft. Multicasting support will be a big step for Adobe, but their success is also going to come to down to their server licensing model and whether or not they make it cheap enough for a company to deploy. If Adobe thinks they can keep the licensing costs high just because they are selling into a "enterprise" company, that would be a big mistake since all Fortune 500 corporations are trying to do more with less. Functionality and features are important, but Flash will only just be catching up to Microsoft, no surpassing them with multicasting, so customers won't pay more for functionality they have already had.

Save The Date: Online Video Networking Event In NYC, May 10th

On Monday May 10th, we'll be teaming up with the NY Video Meetup group to once again host their monthly event at the Hilton Hotel in midtown, the night before the Streaming Media East show opens. Last year we had over 500 attendees watch six promising local online video startups demo their products followed by networking at the Bridges Bar in the lobby of the Hilton hotel. This will be a packed event and we'll open up the website for RSVP and give out more details closer to the event.

Test Results Published Show Flash Is Not a "CPU Hog" Like Apple Claims

There's been a lot of discussion on the blogsphere over the last few weeks due to Steve Jobs being quoted as saying one of the reasons Apple won't support Flash video on the upcoming iPad was due to Flash being a "CPU Hog". Apple's workaround to Flash video is to use HTML5 and that encouraged some to even suggest that HTML5 would kill off Flash, which couldn't be further from the truth.

But rather than debate this topic, Jan Ozer, a technical writer for StreamingMedia.com and encoding guru, decided to spend the time to actually test Flash versus HTML5 and published all of his testing methodology and results on his blog. While you should check out his entire post to see all the details, here are some of the highlights of what he says.

When it comes to efficient video playback, the ability to access hardware acceleration is the single most important factor in the overall CPU load. On Windows, where Flash can access hardware acceleration, the CPU requirements drop to negligible levels. It seems reasonable to assume that if the Flash Player could access GPU-based hardware acceleration on the Mac (or iPod/iPhone/iPad), the difference between the CPU required for HTML5 playback and Flash playback would be very much narrowed, if not eliminated.

Overall, it's inaccurate to conclude that Flash is inherently inefficient. Rather, Flash is efficient on platforms where it can access hardware acceleration and less efficient where it can't. With Flash Player 10.1, Flash has the opportunity for a true leap in video playback performance on all platforms that enable hardware acceleration.

Apple complaining about Flash being a CPU Hog while not exposing "the appropriate hooks" to enable Adobe to access hardware acceleration seems disingenuous at best. To be fair to Apple, though, the iPad related timing was unfortunate, with the bulk of the development work done under the shadow of Flash Player 10.0, which didn't offer hardware acceleration other than full screen on any platform and was clearly less efficient than the HTML5-based approach Apple adopted. Now that Adobe has proven the concept on Windows, perhaps Apple will cooperate with Adobe to make hardware acceleration on the Mac, iPad and future devices happen. If they choose not to, however, they should quit pointing fingers at Flash.

You can see all of the testing results and numbers on Jan's blog here.

Cisco Preparing To Launch New Flip Cameras

Last week someone sent me specs for new Flip cameras Cisco is preparing to launch around the NAB time frame. While I've been able to confirm that new cameras are in fact on the way, I have not been able to verify that the specs I have been sent are completely accurate, so I'm not going to publish them. But keep an eye out on my blog over the coming weeks as I'll make sure to do a review of the new units as soon as I can get my hands on them.