This week Generic Media, an Internet media company that focuses on developing solutions to better distribute online multimedia content, is unveiling the Generic Media Publishing Service, a new streaming media framework that, according to company spokesperson Adam Sherk, “dramatically” reduces the complexities and costs of streaming media.
“With multiple media players, ongoing format enhancements and the growing array of new devices, the current streaming media landscape is chaotic and wrought with uncertainties. We’re completely changing that with our next-generation framework for streaming media,” said Peter Hoddie, CEO of Generic Media, in announcing the launch. (By the way, Hoddie is the former senior architect of QuickTime at Apple). “The Generic Media Publishing Service manages the complexities of streaming media technology, benefiting both the media publisher and the end-user audience. Publishers can now focus on developing value from their media assets, and end-users no longer experience hassles when playing media.”
The Generic Media Publishing Service provides the ability to publish digital content once, and immediately deliver it across multiple formats, devices and platforms, on demand of the user. Founded by Hoddie and Angela Lai, formerly of SGI, Generic Media has over a decade’s worth of creating innovation in the digital media industry.
The traditional media-publishing model requires content owners to create separate copies of their content for each combination of media player and connection speed, as well as to regularly update them to stay compatible with technology advances. This “dated approach” is complicated, expensive and inefficient and regularly renders digital assets obsolete, according to the folks at Generic.
The dynamic media transformation capabilities of the Generic Media Publishing Service lets content publishers reach the established base of media players employed by Internet users, as well as to immediately stream to new devices and formats — all from one streaming master source file, on-the-fly and on-demand, Sherk said.
Streaming masters can be stored in a number of industry standard, digital media formats including AVI, MP3, MPEG-1, QuickTime, and WAVE. The Generic Media Publishing Service transforms the streaming master into formats already installed by the end-user, including QuickTime Streaming, Windows Media Player, Real Player, MP3 streaming, and gMedia formats at a wide range of bit rates.
The Generic Media Publishing Service consists of three components: the Generic Media Transformation Engine, the Delivery Manager, and the Publishing Manager.
The Generic Media Transformation Engine processes streaming media in real-time, automating traditional tasks such as resizing, encoding, sampling and filtering, thus eliminating the need to select media formats, player versions and bit rates in advance. The Delivery Manager is designed to facilitate a smooth media experience for end-users. Audiences can play various types of content with the media players installed on their computer or device. This prevents the need for a user to interrupt their media experience to download an additional media player or to upgrade an existing player in order to access desired content.
The Publishing Manager is a browser-based interface for publishing media. The settings assistant provides step-by-step guidance to create and save unlimited sets of encoding parameters. The assistant simplifies the complex process of setting encoding priorities, adding graphic overlays, and controlling the dimensions of published media. Publishers may also manage their content through FTP which facilitates automated batch uploads of streaming masters.
Canon, Sony, Dreamspan, R/com MediaSchool, ProMax and ZBS Foundation are the first customers of the Generic Media Publishing Service.