The challenge of live and multi-device streaming

LiveTranscoding launches a service that takes the dilemma out of multi-device live streaming and makes it accessible to businesses of any size. This new transcoding service provides live video to all devices without investment in hardware.

LiveTranscoding will announce the public launch of its live transcoding service on June 6. The launch has been preceded by a four-week beta phase, with high-profile clients in the United States, Europe and Asia, as well as a public demonstration by the company's co-founder, at the Streaming Media Conference in New York on May 11.

"Until now, no one has been able to overcome the challenge of live transcoding for multiple devices. On the one hand, there is mastering the complex technology; on the other, turning this into a service that is affordable, flexible and requires little capital investment (CAPEX) and internal maintenance," said Thomas Vander Stichele, co-founder and CTO of LiveTranscoding. “We knew that the market would be excited about this new service, but the response after announcing the beta launch has exceeded our expectations,” he added.

LiveTranscoding has gained the attention of major CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) as well as solution integrators around the world. The new live encoding solution enables them to meet rapidly growing customer demand for live streaming to multiple devices.

A booming market

Según Frost & Sullivan, el mercado de codificadores y transcodificadores de vídeo, está previsto generar $ 1,4 mil millones en ingresos en 2011. Estas cifras indican que el contenido en directo, disponible en todos los dispositivos, se ha convertido en una necesidad para los medios de comunicación y empresas de entretenimiento con el fin de aumentar y mantener su cuota de mercado. Al mismo tiempo, la transmisión de vídeo en directo también está experimentando un rápido crecimiento en todas las industrias, ya que las empresas están utilizando este nuevo canal para las comunicaciones internas y externas.

As more businesses of all sizes integrate live streaming into their digital strategies, they are also demanding flexible services that allow them to meet specific needs and do not require long-term investments. This need has resulted in the emergence of the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model within the Internet video industry. Outsourcing versus in-house solutions is a contentious topic in the industry, especially as the number of devices on the market has skyrocketed in recent years and each requires a different combination of codec, format and stream quality.

If a company wants to target mobile devices, they will need to transcode the stream source into multiple streaming stream outputs. This is not a problem for video on demand, but it is costly for live streaming, since transcoding has to happen in real time.