Vusion Exits Stealth-Mode to Reach Massive Audiences With HD Quality Video Over the Internet

[Shane]

Vusion, Inc., providers of instant-on, full-screen, HD quality streaming video, today announced its formal company launch, leaving behind its stealth-mode name of 'Jittr Networks'. Vusion will deliver the industry's first end-to-end online video distribution service capable of providing the scalability and reach to serve true HD and DVD quality video to 95 percent of all broadband consumers.

The high bandwidth fees and limited reach of current content delivery technologies has made streaming video a loss leader for even the most highly trafficked web properties. Vusion's technology has been designed to...

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[brewster]

At least this seems like a real company vs. last week's Einstein Magic...I've signed up to get their white paper so maybe that will explain something useful as the rest of the website is mush. But sorry, if they say on their website:

Our video delivery service delivers video quality that will make you say "Wow..."

Yip, made me say, "Wow, that's really bad video"

There's nothing in their proprietary player to give any info about quality settings, so I'm only going by what I saw.

I keep hoping someone will come up with a good way to eliminate the shiny plastic discs, but so far, this one isn't it either

[Shane]

I made a comment last week in a separate thread about all these "streaming" services. There are two problems with trying to deliver HD via "streaming":

1) In order to stream HD over a typical internet connection, the video stream is compressed to about 1Mpbs. Compare that to a typical over-the-air HD signal at 12-17Mpbs. Or compare it to a Blu-ray stream at 48Mbps. You can see how any "streamed" signal will have to undergo severe compression to squeeze intoa 1Mbps "pipe". In the process, it loses many of its "HD" qualities.

2) Most, if not all, streaming services available today are available only via PC (or Mac). Most folks do not yet have a PC hooked into their home theaters, so it's not very practical to provide HD streaming unless there is some end device already connected to the TV that is configured to accept it. We're starting to see some of these hit the market this year, but I think the future is in download services, not streaming.

If these companies want a consumer success, they have to make it dirt-simple. Buy a box, plug it in, watch TV. If anything is going to replace packaged media any time soon, it's the "download" model, not "streaming"

- Shane

[brewster]

Hi Shane,

Yes, I agreed 100% with your assessment last week - I think that article is what started me paying more attention to the subsequent PRs on "HD Streaming". (well, and I've lurked long enough on the forums, time for me to shoot my mouth off until I put my foot in it...)

I got their two white papers. IMHO their value is for the service providers, they seem to have built out a good infrastructure (is it fair to say that when it's really peer to peer? i.e. it's everyone else's infrastructure...)

IMHO the big red problem light is their plot (Fig 6) showing MPEG2 at 10 mbps (which I call DVD quality, though the avg. rate is less), H264 @ 3mbps, and whatever their proprietary one is at 1.8 mbps. I agree that main profile h264 at 3 mbps can give you pretty good SD video. But is this chart suggesting that this is for HD? If so it's pretty clear that the quality will be bad.

There's no data anywhere to back up the performance claims of their proprietary format. When it comes to things like this I go by Sagan's "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" rule. IMHO right now they're failing that test, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt as maybe they view that as proprietary. But certainly their demo would fail in the proof department.

Going to be an interesting year to see what, if anything, actually happens in the streaming area.


-Brewster

[Shane]

I checked out a couple of their demo's full screen. They are definitely better than the Einstein Magic service announced last week ... but still nothing that's any better than Apple TV or VUDU. Unless they're going to beat them on pricing or selection, or some value-added service like a subscription model ... I don't see it going anywhere.

Of course, the other thing that's not clear is their business model. I'm not sure if they're going to be a service like Amazon Unbox dealing directly to the consumer, or if they're trying to license their technology to other outfits like Youtube or news websites (CNN, etc).

As an integrated video player on websites, it's good ... but I don't see it as a delivery mechanism for Hollywood type flicks.

- Shane