The same might be said of streaming protocols. The technologies behind the acronyms RTMP, RTSP, HTTP, UDP, and TCP might not be as sexy as topics such as social media, 货币化, and even that other acronym du jour, 奥特, 但是没有他们, none of the sexy stuff would work.
That fact was never as clear to me as it was at this year’s International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) at Amsterdam’s RAI (which, 如果你一定要知道, represents Rijwiel en Automobiel Industrie, or “Bicycle and Automotive Industry,(荷兰语). The show is similar to the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show held in Las Vegas each spring, but IBC has a much different vibe to it than its U.S. 对应. It feels more relaxed, but to call it such would seem to suggest that it’s somehow less serious. Maybe it’s the tasty herring sandwiches rather than the lousy pizza slices available from the concessionaires. But all in all, I’d say it’s more 文明. There are plenty of major deals being made on the show floor, but there’s also a sense of camaraderie and 生活乐趣 absent from the bright lights, big business of NAB.
Most of the enthusiasm I saw was not from the 货币化 or user interface folks but from the hard-core geeks, the ones gushing about the latest protocol to be reduced to an acronym, HLS, or Apple’s HTTP 在线直播. The protocol’s initials-only status is so new, 事实上, that I heard several folks who are intimately familiar with HTTP 在线直播 mutter under their breath, “HLS是什么鬼东西?” Nobody was calling it HLS at NAB in April.
It’s indicative of the fact that, 相反的炒作, HTML5 is not the biggest impact that the iPad and iPhone hath wrought upon our industry. Check out Jan Ozer’s take on HTML5 video in his subtly titled 生产商’s View column, “Enough 关于 HTML5 Video Already” on page 88. Needless to say, we don’t agree with him, as evidenced by the HTML5视频峰会 we’re putting on as part of this year’s 流媒体 West. 炒作与否, organizations are making the leap to HTML5 video, and the summit offers a great opportunity for them to learn more about how to deploy it, as well as to debate a bit about whether we’ve all been snookered. (注意, 然而, that while Jan might be tired of hearing about HTML5 video, he’s not so sick of it that he won’t be offering his popular How-To sessions for encoding for HTML5 and iDevices.)
But there’s no questioning the importance of HLS; even Muhammad Adobe came to Mt. Apple by introducing HLS deli非常 in the latest version of Flash Media Server, and e非常one was touting their HLS compatibility at IBC. This relatively recent refocusing of our industry on protocols rather than formats is significant. For what it’s worth, I didn’t hear anyone at IBC talking about WebM. Perhaps Google should have renamed the VP8 codec with a true acronym?
要开玩笑, the advances playing out in the protocol realm bring home the fundamental issues about how best to send relatively large video files over growing-but-not-unlimited bandwidth. And as Tim Siglin points out in his Streams of Thought column, “No Country for Old Technologies?” (p. 86), HLS relies on an older packaging protocol, the reliable but perhaps outmoded M2TS. Tim suggests that perhaps now is the time to pursue a solution that’s built from the ground up for streaming to tablets and other mobile devices rather than basing one on an old technology designed for broadcast.