GravityLab delivers HTML5 video and players for your web site, and we have supported mp4 h264 video for years on our CDN. You can count on our technical expertise reaching a wide spectrum of screens for wherever your audience is.

Today, HTML5 is essential to serving video to audiences browsing the mobile Web. HTML5 and H.264 are the runtime/format combination that you have to support. And while the mobile market is fragmented, iPhone and iPad users represent an attractive audience demographic of early-adopting, technologically-savvy users that tend to fall into higher income brackets. So yes, if you care about mobile Web video at all today, you’ll need to consider an HTML5 support strategy.

Take a look at our Mobile Video Hosting plans here.

If you distribute or produce content that will be digitally consumed, you are faced with preparing your media for a multitude of screens. From Android-based tablets to the iPad, iPhone 4, and beyond, mobility is the new video frontier. So what’s the right strategy to reach all these devices? How many variants of one clip must a publisher create? Which platforms will yield the greatest uptake?

By becoming a GravityLab mobile video hosting client,we can help you deliver live and on demand streaming to every screen. Let us help you:

• develop an effective and efficient streaming mobile device strategy
• simplify video delivery to mobile devices
• increase views and reach a broader audience with mobile video
• overcome the challenges for monetizing video to mobile

Get started with GravityLab Mobile Streaming Video Hosting today !

GravityLab is pleased to offer HTTP Dynamic Streaming for all accounts. Here is an overview of the top features available to all our customers:

• HD quality with H.264 and AAC
• Adaptive bitrate
• Support for a wide range of http delivery products
• Live streaming with DVR support
• On-demand streaming with enhanced seeking
• Client tracking and reporting
• Open Source Players Available
• Multiplatform browser, desktop, and device support
• Linux and Windows Server® support
• MP4 standard format … open standards

Content Delivery Network scalable delivery:

Use existing caching infrastructures and standard HTTP server hardware to deliver on-demand and live content on a large scale with maximum quality.

Go way beyond progressive download delivery:

Enjoy enhanced playback features including adaptive bitrate streaming, live support, DVR functionality, and interactive seeking over HTTP connections.

We support open source:

Achieve a live streaming experience using MP4 fragment format, the industry standard for adaptive bitrate delivery.

Want more information? Check out the FAQs. Ready to get started with HTTP Streaming hosting?

GravityLab Multimedia Adds Full HTTP Streaming For iOS4 Devices
Live and on-demand streaming now available for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch

Eugene, OR – March 27, 2011 — GravityLab Multimedia, the world’s most cost effective and most reliable content delivery network (CDN), today announced full support for HTTP live and on-demand streaming to the Apple iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. Today’s announcement includes full support for Apple’s new iOS 4, keeping GravityLab poised to meet surging market demand for streaming to millions of Apple iOS devices, including the iPhone and iPad.

“It’s important for us to make HTTP streaming to iOS as simple to deploy as possible for a wide spectrum of users, from technical web developers to non-technical users.” Said JD Hauger, director of Media Services.

Whether streaming audio or video, live events, or sending secure on-demand content with encryption and streaming server authentication, the parity between of Apple and GravityLab Multimedia means anyone, anywhere can deliver efficient, high quality video to every Apple portable devices.

GravityLab’s iOS 4 support includes http dynamic stream technology, which is supported by the media player built into Apple iOS 4. Http dynamic streaming selection lets an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch automatically switch between different bit rates depending on the device’s current connection speed. By switching bit rates as needed as network conditions change, Your audience and video stream is far more likely be a clear and buffer free viewing experience, whether connecting through AT&T’s EDGE, 3G, Verizon or Wi-Fi.

GravityLab Multimedia’s streaming customers can now deliver video streaming to all Apple iOS 4 devices. Streaming media to some of the world’s most popular consumer devices is very appealing, and doing so via a global CDN brings significant competitive advantages. GravityLab uses global load balancing and automatically routes users to the streaming server and datacenter fastest and closest to them. This ensures that Apple iOS devices receive a clear, uninterrupted experience, free of the usual issues related to network congestion or long distances between viewers and streaming video content servers.

HTTP streaming for Apple devices is available to GravityLab clients for both live and on-demand content. To learn more, visit, contact us today.

About GravityLab Multimedia:
Delivering streaming video to every screen, everywhere, GravityLab is the world’s most reliable content delivery network. To learn more, visit www.gravlab.com.

HTTP Live Streaming, iPhone, iPad, iPod, and iOS are trademarks of Apple, Inc.

Media contact:
J.D. Hauger
(541) 914-2012

GravityLab’s digital video recording (DVR) feature changes the way you think about live video on the web. Many of us at home watch our television through the use of a DVR, the successor of the VCR. You can use it to record your favorite shows when they air, or pause a live stream while you tend to something else. In either case, you can watch your program in its entirety or even go backwards to catch something you missed the first time through. The trend here is that video consumers are watching live media on their own time — and on their own terms.

Considering this new aspect of live television, it’s only natural to look toward the same experience on the web. GravityLab will change the way we watch, interact, and monetize live streaming on the web.

Flash Media Server has always had the ability to archive a live stream on the server for On2/Sorenson based content. Flash Media Server can now archive H.264/AAC content too. DVR functionality extends this basic archive function by allowing you to watch the stream as video on demand as it’s being written to the disk. You can pause, play, and seek around the video cache, as if it were a prerecorded stream. You can even insert cue points to manage advertising (for example, disabling the seek bar when ads are played).

The most exciting part of this feature is the ability to scale. If you choose to deploy the Edge caching technology of Flash Media Server or manage your own large cluster, this functionality is easy to deploy using the automatic caching technology or manage by creating custom plug-ins.

From the client side, nothing special is required. When your live event is over, you can take the DVR cache and make it available as a VOD stream.

GravityLab’s live flash video DVR functionality. Changing the way your broadcast on the web.

GravityLab Multimedia Inc is pleased to to announce a comprehensive content delivery network upgrade for 2011. The CDN upgrade is fully deployed and operational, and we’ll be migrating all our current clients over the next few weeks. All new clients are automatically setup on the new supercharged Content Delivery Network.

What’s new for 2011? We took a new approach. We identified a smaller number of strategic global locations near primary Internet Exchange Points, and built supercharged points of presence we call SuperPOPs. These SuperPOPs have massive amounts of computing and caching power and are directly connected to all the major backbone fiber networks.

The result is a blow your mind fast streaming content delivery network that’s custom built for mobile delivery, streaming video, and large multimedia files that need to be distributed globally. Our new globally distributed network means your content is just milliseconds away from almost every broadband user in the world.

So what exactly are we talking about? For starters, we’ve added the following POPs to our CDN that your content is cached on and delivered from automatically :

North America: Los Angeles (2), San Jose, Seattle, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Ashburn and New York

Europe: London (2), Paris, Frankfurt and Amsterdam

Asia: Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore

Australia: Sydney

So what does that mean?

Our Content Delivery Network for video and media delivery truly is global, with our SuperPOPs (points of presence) located on four continents. These concentrations of optimized streaming servers are located at integral Internet exchange points and are just milliseconds away from almost every broadband user on the planet. Because our SuperPOPs are located directly at the world’s fastest data interchanges, we are able to deliver more content with less overhead than other CDNs. Our CDN is efficient, scalable and the reason why we routinely outperform older CDNs in performance tests while remaining price-competitive.

Not only have we placed our POPs inside the same data centers where the major backbone providers peer with each other, we have also signed peering agreements with the majority of the global carriers. Our tactic – physically distributing our high end video streaming caching servers at the carrier interconnection points, while peering with the carriers – means we can offer mind blowing speed, the industry’s lowest priced delivery, and stream your media to even the most remote geographies.

Our business model is not complicated – We buy our bandwidth in huge amounts and parcel it out for you to take advantage at wholesale prices. We bundle that bandwidth with our optimized streaming video servers strategically located around the globe. In addition to the low bandwidth pricing, the caching of your content around the world, the highest end new tech video servers, you also get to take advantage of our team of experts’ knowledge of media delivery.

GravityLab now will encode your video to iOS adoptive bit rate streaming, directly from any source video you add to your account. We encode and provide all the m3u8 and .ts output files from a single source video, so all you need to do is link to the m3u8 file. Simple.

You simply add video to your account and we do all of the heavy lifting to support advanced video delivery to Apple mobile devices.

Designed into iPhone OS 3.0 and 4.0, the built-in video player now supports adaptive bit rate switching during playback. As a user watches a video, the iPhone player will detect the user’s available bandwidth and automatically adjust to the appropriate bit rate during playback. This process is a much better viewing experience: higher quality (bit rate) videos are streamed for faster WiFi connections while lesser quality videos are streamed in low bandwidth situations such as is the case with AT&Ts 3G network. We can even encode your video so that it fails over to an audio only stream for weak cellular signals if necessary. You reach everyone, everywhere on iOS.

Apple calls this Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming. To take advantage of this, you need to create a set of files including a master .m3u8 streaming instruction file, a .m3u8 file for each bitrate you have specified, and all the video segments (MPEG .ts) in the duration specified.

GravityLab does all the encoding work for you, automatically.

For more information about Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming encoding services at GravityLab, take a look at our iOS video hosting plans.

Nielson has released their quarterly “Three Screens” report, tracking television, online video and mobile video usage. Here are the highlights:

Key Conclusions:

• Mobile subscribers watching video on a mobile phone year-over year growth is a notable 51.2%
• Over half (55%) of the mobile video audience is aged 25-49, not teens as some might think
• Simultaneous usage of television and PC remains fairly constant
• Broadband: 63.5% of homes now have broadband Internet access, with high-speed connections that improve online video delivery
• Smartphones: Nearly a quarter of households (up 38% year-over-year) have smartphones (mobile phones with advanced operating systems), making it easier for consumers to “place shift” and watch video wherever they are

Trends to Watch:

• As smartphone penetration continues to proliferate, consumers will be increasingly using these devices (versus PCs) to access the Internet
• With networks beginning to develop loyalty programs for their shows (via apps, etc.), social media will play a larger role in audience engagement
• 3D televisions and content hitting the market may cause a change in viewing behaviors and programming demand for a small but important audience segment
• The emergence of other connected devices, including tablet computers like Apple’s popular iPad, will create additional options for media consumption anytime, anywhere

“Beyond the TV, technology is helping drive video use on the ‘second’ and ‘third’ screens. The proliferation of broadband access is bolstering online video, creating an alternative mass outlet for distributing television content and ‘timeshifting’ long-form TV. Similarly, the increased popularity of smartphones has created yet another opportunity for distributing video of all kinds outside of traditional broadcast and cable TV airing times and places. In an era when many feel the quality and diversity of video content is at an all-time high, it’s clear that there’s more at work than programming alone. Technology enhancements also contribute significantly to the quality of the consumer experience—yet another reason today’s consumers watch more video, across time and place, than ever before.”

Q1 2010 Highlights:

• The amount of time spent watching television is still increasing: viewers watched two more hours of TV per month in Q1 2010 than in Q1 2009
• Average time spent simultaneously using TV and Internet in the home grew 9.8%, to 3 hours and 41 minutes per month
• The number of people who are timeshifting has grown 18% since last year to 94 million, with theaverage user now timeshifting 9 hours and 36 minutes per month
• The mobile video audience grew 51.2% year-overyear,surpassing 20 million users for the first time
• 52.7% of US homes now have HDTVs and receive HDTV signals

Read the entire Nielson Report here

GravityLab is making it easier to stream video to the iPhone, Android and Blackberry thanks to new capabilities that let content owners use their existing H.264 and MPEG4 files to serve iOS, Android and Blackberry OS devices adaptive HTTP streams, saving them a second encoding step.

GravityLab currently supports RTP/RTSP streaming (3GPP PSS, ISMA), HTML progressive download (HTML5 video tag). Adobe Flash Streaming (RTMP) is supported through Adobe Flash Player plugin.

Thanks to changes at GravityLab, customer only need to encode once. GravityLab can take multiple source formats including H.264 and MPEG4 files for mobile delivery. The underlying video isn’t touched. This saves customers not only from the second encode, but from having to store and manage those extra files.

Mobile video hosting pricing and plans.

Today Apple talked about the new iPhone 3.0 software that will be available this spring.

Apple announced that the new iPhone software will be compatible with embedded video in HTML5, which is supported by GravityLab’s mobile hosting solutions, like mp4 H.264. Also HTTP streaming for audio and video, codecs and chunking support.

Trust the GravityLab network for all your streaming video hosting solutions, including iPhone streaming products designed to reach your mobile audience.

To get started with a free consultation about converting your multimedia assets to mobile compatible formats and delivery, contact us today.

The Lonely Forest, Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head and The Oregon Donor are Pacific Northwest pop bands finding new fans across the country. The groups are getting recording contracts, touring widely and generating buzz in the pages of pop music magazines like Spin. Part of their success comes from their prize winning performances at Sound Off. Sponsored by Seattle’s Experience Music Project, the Sound Off competition is a battle of Pacific Northwest bands made up of musicians 21 years old and younger.

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or High Quality mp3 or Low Speed mp3

University of Washington President Mark Emmert and the department of Computer Science and Engineering host Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates for the final stop of his six-university tour, as Gates transitions from Microsoft to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

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via nytimes.com

Millions of cubicle dwellers across the country helped set records for Internet traffic on Tuesday as they watched online video of the inauguration ceremonies — or at least tried to. The overwhelming demand meant that some Web sites and data networks had trouble keeping up, forcing many people to turn to less cutting-edge forms of media.

The latest on the inauguration of Barack Obama and other news from Washington and around the nation. Join the discussion.

“It was really frustrating to have this great technology and still not be able to watch the speech,” said Dan Robinson, who runs the box office at the Julliard School in New York. “I had to use this TV from the early ’80s and some rabbit ears to watch it.”

Internet traffic in the United States hit a record peak at the start of President Obama’s speech as people watched, read about and commented on the inauguration, according to Bill Woodcock, the research director at the Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit organization that analyzes online traffic. The figures surpassed even the high figures on the day President Obama was elected.

“The peak is the highest measured to date, and it appears to be mostly a U.S. phenomenon,” Mr. Woodcock said, adding that it did not appear that global records would be set.
Continue reading Record demand for streaming video: Obama Inauguration

From WNYC – “The video-sharing site YouTube is a reliable source of homemade comedy, political manifestos and quirky confessionals. It could also put some music teachers out of a job. Today we examine the pros and cons of music lessons offered through the popular online destination.”

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