Digital Fountain Launches Beta Site For New CDN Offering

Digital Fountain's new streaming video CDN is now live with the recent launch of its DF Splash Beta website. The new website gives an overview of their CDN offering, provides live demos of their solution and is open for visitors to join their beta program to add streaming video capabilities to their own web sites. One temporary draw back right now is that the demo requires you to download a plugin that only works with XP but I'm being told that will only be for a few weeks longer. Since I'm on a Mac, I can't say what the quality looks like so I hope others will take a look and post what they think about it in the comments section.

Comments

[Steve Lerner]

I installed the 4.3MB plugin on my Windows XP SP2 machine here at the RampRate office in the Empire State Building. We have 3mbps DSL here.

The Digital Fountain samples looked great- they are all good tests of video- large resolution scenes in constant motion. The Forward Error Correction used by Digital Fountain seemed to work- but if they are working the user shouldn't be able to tell.

I'd like to see some demos of true 29.95FPS video instead of action scenes pulled down to 24fps to give a film like effect, and would like to see demos that are two hours long and see how well those work all the way through.

But overall the demo shows DF's claims to be legit- at least for the demo. The Digital Fountain team are experts at error correction that improves reliability of a real time stream- they use more bandwidth than the media portion of the stream requires and the extra bits are keyed with critical encoded data to be used in case the overall bitrate drops.

-Steve