流媒体聚光灯:吉姆布鲁顿的许多生活

"Ever since I was a child, I was interested in both technology and media," says Jim Bruton. "I would be inspired by Disney's House of the Future while watching wildlife films on television, 想知道, “我怎么能两者兼顾呢??'" 

布鲁顿确实做了这两件事, and his love of technology and the outdoors-as well as his revolutionary efforts in creating new satellite video systems-have taken him around the world many times, 从泰坦尼克号的深处到珠穆朗玛峰的高处. 珠穆朗玛峰.

让我们往回看一下.

Jim Bruton graduated from the University of North Carolina. Not long after graduating, he was hired to make wildlife films. He worked for National Geographic (where he won an Emmy), 哥伦比亚广播公司, 和英国的安格里亚电视台(现在的英国独立电视台). But it was while scouting locations for Disney in Namibia in 1992 that his path really began. 

"We were out about 300 miles from anyone on the world's tallest sand dunes, and the Disney crew took out a bunch of cases and unfolded a nickelized polyester dish, 然后拿出一个听筒, 然后叫他们回工作室. 我只是想，‘这太神奇了. We're so remotely located, and they have this instant communication by satellite,'" says Bruton. 

充满了可能性, Bruton started to wonder if he could push video over a satellite stream. 作为一名野生动物摄影师, 他总是在想讲故事的新方法, 这似乎是一个完美的方法. He got his own satellite phone and began testing it out in 1993. 他还回到了美国.S. to meet with companies such as Bell Labs, Magnavox, and Inmarsat to discuss his ideas. 这是在万维网诞生的时候, 布鲁顿向专家们介绍了他的想法, putting together different pieces of the solution he'd need.

他需要的东西根本不存在, but he knew he could create it if he could integrate the right ingredients. He started by using an analog video codec from Bell Laboratories, which he had some success with. 然而, the time it took to push the analog signal up to the satellite and then bounce it back down left a lot of room for errors to creep in. There were so many errors, in fact, that the modems on each end couldn't remain in sync. 

发明之母

接下来，布鲁顿知道他需要一条全数字化的道路. In 1995, Inmarsat was about to launch a digital service that went commercial after a year of testing. Bruton thought that he could send digital video if he could combine several satellite phones together to create a larger aggregate signal. 他实际上是在创建自己的ISDN网络. ISDN信道以64的倍数工作, 而在菲律宾, Bruton figured out how to combine four satellite phones together to create a 256K channel. He successfully tested it and broadcast live for an hour.

你只能聚合这么多流, says Bruton-it requires carrying around a lot of satellite phones. He needed to find a practical number of phones that would give him the largest pipe possible. 他还需要找到最佳的视频压缩. 他最初认为, 这么小的管子, a small camera would perform just as well as a larger one. But he found that even over his satellite stream, viewers really could see a difference. 经过几次实地试验，他找到了解决办法.

"Before you knew it, I had cobbled together a system that worked most of the time," laughs Bruton.

1996年，他揭开了自己作品的面纱, when he went live from Mexico during an Earthwatch expedition. His audience was a group of schoolchildren gathered at the Harvard Science Center to learn how animals were tagged and studied. After the demo, Bruton held a live question-and-answer session. 这是一个突破性的时刻.

“太棒了。. It really did finally bring together the storytelling aspect and the love of technology aspect,布鲁顿说. Bruton credits Bob Ballard's work with the Jason Project, a distance education program that showed off the Titanic to schoolchildren, 作为他的灵感. 布鲁顿的教育视频找到了观众, it led to business opportunities that took him around the world, 从墨西哥和非洲的丛林到珠穆朗玛峰. 珠穆朗玛峰，甚至是泰坦尼克号. He began his satellite videos as a feature on the early online service Prodigy, 以及苹果的eWorld. 在太. 珠穆朗玛峰, 他展示了登山者住的小屋, 夏尔巴人在做饭, 危险的攀冰. 在泰坦尼克号上, he was the field producer for a Discovery Channel expedition and showed a sonar locator that outlined the position of the ship.

The satellite video system that made it all possible was like a TV truck in a suitcase, he says. It let him go to the most remote places on earth and stream live with a portable system. While it wasn't TV-quality footage, it was always compelling. Bruton was able to leverage his credibility as an Emmy award-winning filmmaker for National Geographic to get his foot in the door at companies he wanted to work with. Once he set up his video equipment in those companies' parking lots and gave them live demonstrations of what he could do, 他们准备签约了.Some opportunities surprised him, however, such as the one that took him to the top of 珠穆朗玛峰.

“接下来我就知道了, I was getting a call from [Telekom Malaysia] regarding transmitting live video from 珠穆朗玛峰 for the Malaysian 珠穆朗玛峰 team, 代表马来西亚国王,布鲁顿说。. 那是在1997年, and the 5-month project went so well that Bruton went back four more times to shoot video of the annual climb.