Online video is exploding as consumers download and stream video to their laptops, PCs and increasingly to mobile devices. That’s no surprise given the popularity of devices like the Apple iPhone, Web sites like YouTube, Wi-Fi and 3G networks. Consider this – US Internet users alone viewed 11.5 billion videos in March, up 13% over the previous month.
But with so many formats, devices and network types like 2.5G, 3G, Wi-Fi and WiMAX comes a big problem for content owners and service providers – how do you adapt the video content to different formats, mobile devices and network types?
The conventional process of customized coding for each device and network type restricts real-time downloads besides being capital intensive and requiring extensive human interaction. At the same time there is pressure on content owners and broadband and mobile service providers to offer dynamic, high quality content over their networks to any device.
Tackling this seemingly insurmountable problem is multimedia delivery specialist Dilithium, which has just launched a content adapter to automate the real-time adaptation and delivery of video content over multiple networks to any mobile device.
Dubbed the Dilithium Content Adapter (DCA), the software product is described as well suited for services that are required to offer content in a range of formats to a variety of devices and networks. Dilithium executives say the company’s patented technologies perform real-time on demand media conversion with minimal latency and eliminate the need for costly offline transcoding.
The DCA is said to support client access from different sources including HTTP and RTSP servers. File formats supported include 3GP, 3GP2, FLV, WAV, MP4, MPG and AVI.
Other features of the DCA include the ability to source content from live streams, downloaded files or on-demand streams and the ability to insert dynamic pre-roll and post-roll advertisements. Content from different sources can also be combined within a client session using the script based API.
DCA comes with interfaces to let operators optimize content for handset capabilities and screen resolution. An optional caching capability for frequently demanded content minimizes server resources and boosts capacity density.
DCA is supposed to scale from small trial installations of tens of sessions through to distributed systems suitable for very large scale services through the use of service node clusters.
The system comes with a management application to monitor and configure all elements and to access a range of performance statistics.
Dilithium said DCA supports different pricing models including existing capex model or based on the number of transcoded adapted streams.