Adobe acquiring Video software to push Flash Video

The impact of Adobe acquiring Serious Magic might of interest to anybody doing FLV creation at a consumer level.

Adobe’s is even recognizing YouTube and MySpace use of Flash Video. Is this Adobe’s first acquistion related to Flash technology since their merger, probably not. But either way its cool to see Adobe building upon their purchase of Macromedia.

“The huge momentum behind Flash® Video, which is powering everything from online TV shows to YouTube and MySpace, is turbo-charging Adobe’s video business,” said John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions Business Unit at Adobe. “The purchase of Serious Magic accelerates our vision to make, not just video but all dynamic media, an even more ubiquitous communications vehicle, whether you’re delivering content for the broadcast market, over the web or on mobile devices.”

Another thing to think about is this clearly shows Adobe pushing Flash Video through 3rd party product acquisition and not just creating tools themselves. As most of Serious Magic’s tools are geared for alpha channel at the consumer level, and production level, it will be interesting to see them position these products in the future. I would love to see an simple application for users to create alpha channel FLV’s…

Add comment October 19th, 2006

VitalStream being acquired by Internap

You can find the news release here.

The deal is worth about $217 million and is to happen by first quarter 2007. Here is the main quote from the CEO of VitalStream:

“Internap’s acquisition of VitalStream is a business combination that creates a scalable public company with complementary product lines and accelerated growth potential. We believe that this is an exciting value proposition for our customers including unparalleled distribution, network quality and customized solutions, as well as aunique alternative for investors.” said Jack Waterman, chairman and chief executive officer of VitalStream. “The new Internap will offer turnkey digital media broadcasting solutions for web users of all sizes. By uniting our two organizations, customers will have a complete solution to realize the full on-line potential of their digital assets.”

First of all this is very interesting because I have been following Internap for years now. Back when it was a penny stock and not so profitable. I liked Internap’s IP and what they were doing at the time as it was something I thought should be offered to more business at a cheaper price. But custom high quality routing of internet traffic is not that cheap I guess.

Internap has grown quite well over the years and with this move they are moving into more of the mainstream then just Enterprise clients. Internap can definetly help VitalStreams services in terms of latency and routing, but I can’t remember how much CDN type services Internap has.

Its interesting to see the one of Internap’s clients is Adobe it self. They have a very impressive list of clients to say the least.

Add comment October 13th, 2006

Flex 2 and FMS (ConnectionMonitor Component)

The Flex 2 / Flash Media Server 2 (FMS) Connection Monitor component provides real time stats on a FMS connection. The detailed stats include latency, up bandwidth, and down bandwidth. Connected a Camera instance to the class also monitors FPS.

Here is a screenshot of the FMS and Flex components in action. Its pretty basic but is meant to be extend for somone’s specific needs.

This does show how to use Flex 2 with FMS. There is a README in the source which you can find here.

2 comments August 22nd, 2006

Windows 2003 Server does not stream FLV videos (Flash TechNote)

Windows Server 2003 does not have a mime-type for the extension “.flv”. This causes a lot of headaches when you believe your Flash video application should work but doesn’t. There is a Adobe tech note located here.

Continue Reading 3 comments June 15th, 2006

Flash Media Server on Fedora Core 2

I tried getting a Flash Media Server installed on a Fedora Core 2 box. I spent hours figuring out why after running the start script nothing would happen. It wasn’t until I tried running “./fmsmaster” by it self that I got an error back.

./fmsmaster: error while loading shared libraries: libnspr4.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Then it took me some google searching to find that the libnspr4.so belongs to the
“mozilla-nspr-1.7.6-1.2.5.i386.rpm” (for fedora core 2 that is).

ES4 required “seamonkey-nspr” to make the libnspr4.so error to go away.

A little yum-ing and it was all better.

5 comments March 18th, 2006