Digital Hollywood in the Big Apple

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June 6, 2000
Web posted at: 10:23 a.m. EDT (1423 GMT)

by Scott Myers

(IDG) -- New York City recently showed its strength as a content -- and content-delivery -- mecca as the Digital Hollywood conference hosted some of the most innovative and footloose media companies from the Big Apple and beyond.

Innovation often comes from small and determined groups. Many of the exhibitors at Digital Hollywood were highly energetic, weaving and ducking like boxers, looking to fill voids and solve problems the mega corporations aren't.

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iShell in 3-D

Viable projects create a community. One of the best examples is Tribeworks, developer of iShell, a tool for creating multimedia content. A viable community these days consists of tool makers, tool users and buyers of the content. Tribeworks does a good job of providing all three components. The excellent iShell party during Digital Hollywood had more buyers of content than content makers, mostly advertising companies and publishers. This is a good sign.

The iShell authoring and playback programs are free, but the company charges $2,000 ($1,000 annual renewal) for a one-year subscription that includes additional software, support and other resources, such as referrals. Members also have access to a steady stream of software improvements. Non-members receive iShell when full revisions are available.

Like Totally Hip's LiveStage, iShell builds on the strength of the rich QuickTime API. But, where Totally Hip's offering works within QuickTime, iShell builds on top of it (thus the name "iShell").

The company's latest offering, iShell 2.0, adds user-scriptable 3-D through Pulse Entertainment's Pulse3D technology. The 3-D wire mesh is separate from the bump map, and both can be manipulated independently, providing an efficient environment. Pulse's authoring tools are currently available only for Windows.

As with the new MetaStream MTS3 format, the iShell/Pulse technology can monitor use of objects on the Web, an important feature to people who pay for the projects. But, unlike MTS3, the pieces made with iShell/Pulse are active modules more than stand-alone 3-D objects. TribeWorks demonstrated an interactive 3-D talking head in the margin of a custom QuickTime player window.

Spike Radio offers a sample iShell 2.0 project on its Web site. iShell 2.0 is available to members now, and free to non-members in about two weeks.

Moving the bits

My best find at Digital Hollywood was a streaming-media service called BitMovers. You can't have content without delivery, and this is a good opportunity for "the rest of us" to put our streaming content online. The company's secure server farm is located less than two hops away from several North American backbones. For $56.25 a month you get 100MB of storage and data throughput as high as 45 T1 lines. It's cheaper than using Akamai's distributed server network, but offers faster throughput than you'd get running the streams yourself on Mac OS X Server.

To prepare a movie for streaming, you simply save it with hinting and upload it to your BitMovers partition. You then reference the movie on your site (with an rtsp address instead of http). You can also use Terran's Media Cleaner Pro (I recommend the current beta 4.0.3) to create a set of alternative movies, each with a different data rate and size. Media Cleaner creates a master movie (and even the associated HTML code), which determines the user's connection speed and plays the appropriate movie.

You can also produce live Webcasts. If you have a reasonable upstream speed (about 200 mbps), Sorenson Broadcaster will convert the live video and audio on the fly and send it to BitMovers, and then on to your audience. Broadcaster even prepares an announcement about the event that you can e-mail to your intended audience. The announcement includes information needed to see the broadcast.

With Akamai's service, a copy of your media is pre-distributed to a large number of servers around the world. When someone requests your content, it's served from the nearest source, reducing the time it takes to arrive. It's faster than BitMovers' service, but also more expensive.

E3 impressions
May 18, 2000
Top gaming news from E3 in Los Angeles
May 15, 2000
Digital toys mix form, function
May 12, 2000

Who needs Hollywood?
(Macworld)
Apple execs talk QuickTime
(Macworld)
Animation in a Flash
(Macworld)
So you wanna make a movie?
(PC World Online)
Apple makes Final Cut at Sundance
(Macworld U.K.)
From online to the big screen
(The Industry Standard)
The hidden powers of QuickTime
(Macworld)
Sony rolls out low-cost video PC
(PC World Online)

Tribeworks, Inc.
Totally Hip
Bitmovers Networks, Inc.
Akamai Technologies, Inc.
Terran Interactive

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