Here’s a nice list of some of the important MS bloggers. This list is growing fast and so is the noise level. I can’t wait until they have an editor.
Microsoft’s Bloggers
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Tag Archives: Hype
What’s up with Brightcove?
Here’s what I found so far:
The founder Jeremy Allaire is smart guy. He was one of the creators of Cold Fusion. He also created Homesite which became part of the very successful Dreamweaver application produced by Macromedia.
What Brightcove is doing:
Creating an open standards based software application that will be used for finding and watching video streams off the internet and on your TV. The idea is to strike deals with companies like Tivo, Sony, Phillips, etc. to use this software on their systems. Another plan is to get it running on home media center systems like MS Media Center Edition or on OS X. This is a big challenge these companies are already producing their own products. They’re big difference from all the other web based video tools like this is that they want to get this off a computer screen and on to a TV screen.
What technology are they using:
The front end is an all web based Flash interface. All the video is played through flash using the On2 Flix software for encoding. So something a lot like Google video.
Quote from Brightcove:
“It’s our hope and intention for Brightcove to become an essential online service for building Internet TV businesses – with full choice and control for publishers over user experience, monetization and syndication.”
Why AOL:
This is huge for them. One of the big challenges they faced was getting advertiser dollars. Now they have the backing of AOL and if successful can integrate in to their ad network. I’m also guessing that this could solve their bandwidth problem if they every had one.
My take away:
Home media computers are on the rise but are still a very small market space. Apple, Microsoft and other very large well funded companies are trying to get in to this space. Brightcove wants to piggyback on that. They can be successful if they have good content, can find ways to make content providers money, and it’s easy to use. I’m not sure what their plan is in regards to quality programming. Without quality you end up with the same stuff that’s on google video: people crashing their cars, cats, babies, and more dumb people doing dumb stuff. I for one don’t want to watch that sort of crap.
Technology wise what they are doing is easy. At least from everything I’ve been able to find. It’s just been a matter of putting together all the said technologies in to one easy to repurpose package. I’m not sure what their storage solution is but I guess some very large SAN system.
Apple patent references a digital camera
This article seems to think that Apple might be about to release a digital camera. Although the patent does look nice, companies like Apple patent technology all the time that they feel is ownable. I do miss the QuickTake from Apple. It was the first digital camera I ever had. 640×480 and it actually had a nice ID form factor.
Xbox 360
Oh, and just in case you didn’t know, Microsoft released the new Xbox 360 today. Bill Gates was at the Bellevue Best Buy last night at midnight handing out the systems to buyers. One unlucky kid got his stolen from him right after he bought it.
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