wimax

SLIDESHOW - Livecast: Intel & Sprint's goto WiMAX demo app

Doug Mohney — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:58:49 -0400

As Intel and Sprint have promoted the WiMAX forest at events across the U.S., the Livecast tree shows up in every picture.

Livecast has been one of the most featured demonstration applications for WiMAX at shows ranging from CES and CTIA, to last week's XOHM launch event in Baltimore.

To view the trio of Livecast pictures, click here.

Livecast: The Intel & Sprint go-to XOHM WiMAX app

Doug Mohney — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:22:55 -0400

As Intel and Sprint have promoted the WiMAX forest at events across the U.S., the Livecast tree shows up in every picture.

Livecast, formerly known as ComVu, has been one of the most featured demonstration applications for WiMAX at shows ranging from CES and CTIA to last week's XOHM launch event in Baltimore. Livecast provides a live video broadcast service for portable platforms, including 3G mobile phones and WiMAX-enabled devices. A Livecast studio application handles streams from multiple devices for viewing and management in real time, so enterprise, government or media users can switch between multiple devices to monitor an area or event.

The Livecast client is smart enough to take advantage of GPS if it's available and blends in a location and time stamp directly to a stream for use with geo-tagging applications and online maps; a Livecast viewer can watch a stream in real time or on archived playback and follow the location of the Livecast device on a Google map as the video is displayed.

A typical WiMAX demo using Livecast has a centralized studio view set up in a fixed location, typically a display station at a trade show booth. Multiple video streams from two to four vehicles roaming around an event venue are fed into the studio view in real time with WiMAX serving as the high-speed broadband link between the mobile vehicles and a Livecast server; studio view acts as a dashboard to monitor streams with the ability to view locations and flip between streams/vehicles.

Each vehicle is typically equipped with an ultramobile PC (UMPC) with a web camera and a WiMAX dongle to provide connectivity. PC-based operating systems supported include Windows Vista, Windows XP SP2 and Apple OS X version 10.3.9 or better.

A version of Livecast Pro is available for beta download; in an unscripted and unplanned demonstration for this reporter, a 2 MB self-installing package took less than 5 minutes to install on an Acer Aspire One computer running Windows XP. The installation procedure was smart enough to recognize the onboard web camera in the Aspire One without prompting and, other than typing in a user name and password, little effort was required to start live and archival streaming.

Livecast CEO and founder William Mutual said Livecast, unlike competing products, took live streams and directly processed them into Windows Media and Apple Quick Time streaming formats. Once in those formats, streams are transcoded on the fly, if necessary, to different mobile device codecs for viewing on their respective clients.

While Mutual is reluctant to talk about it, his company has strategic relationships with AT&T, Motorola and Alcatel-Lucent, as well as Intel and Microsoft. In January, the company was selected to join the Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program. The program is best described as an incubator for high-potential startups working with Microsoft, providing an extensive support network, access to Microsoft people and programs, and guidance on future directions.

Mutual indicated Livecast has done extensive work with Microsoft's Silverlight product, and the company may have some announcements following the introduction of Silverlight 2 [Silverlight 2 was announced today]

For more:
- Go look at Livecast's website for yourself.

A Virtuous Cycle (Or some cliché like that)

Doug Mohney — Thu, 08 May 2008 21:32:00 -0400

After months of negotiations and delays, a nationwide WiMAX network is coming to the United States. And this is a good thing for online video lovers everywhere.

The goodness is going to come in four ways. First, WiMAX will enable faster, more affordable mobility. You'll be able to pull down video faster than EVDO-based cellular services and in more places than vanilla WiFi, without the headaches of WiFi. You'll see more variety and form factors for portable devices outside of the stock cell phone and stock laptop, with some of them showing up embedded in vehicles ranging from large family cars to full-blown coaches. Trains might be an interesting platform to take advantage of WiMAX's range and speed.

WiMAX will also put the screws to vanilla DSL and cable pricing. In more competitive markets, where fiber and high-speed cable are already in a slow leapfrog race to 100 Mbps to the household, WiMAX may not bring much more to the party. With smaller markets, WiMAX will provide some needed competition. Faster and cheaper pipes mean better access to video, be it live or on-demand. If it lights a fire under Verizon to continue to deploy FiOS and AT&T to get around to deploying more fiber to the home, then it's a good thing.

Faster mobility leads to faster and easier capture and delivery of video from remote locations. A vacationing family will be able to record several hours of activities during the day on their WiMAX-video camera, and beam it back to the family server overnight. The next day, they go out and do it all over again, no fuss, no muss. If this sounds a little far-fetched, Sprint and others have repeatedly said WiMAX chipsets are going to end up in non-traditional devices including video cameras. It's going to bring an interesting twist to the use of the traditional news van.

Finally, WiMAX will end up driving a long-overdue upgrade to the backbone networks expected to transport those faster data streams. And if you don't think that has to happen, then how do you think the first rollouts of LTE will be supported in a couple of years? LTE backhaul will require fiber optic networks, and those networks will most likely be the same ones being built to carry WiMAX today.

Faster backhaul networks will also (hopefully) mean lower broadband costs, and lower broadband costs means more video delivered faster to more places.

Thank you, Dan Hesse, for getting a deal done.

- Doug