Music Business - The Internet a River, Not a Highway

By: Josh Coe
Word Count: 984

The Tech Currents That Bring Adult Video Streaming your Way

Music Business - While the future holds the promise of total convergence of media and delivery systems, most adult webmasters are still playing catch up with industry leaders like Vivid, which recently added a download-to-DVD option to its independent artist website. For the stragglers, though, the future is now. They need to jump into the Internet River of streaming media, and right now.

Stepping into the stream

The first step of music business is to rip the DVD onto a computers hard drive. What we do, without the use of any off-the-shelf software, but for the average webmaster there are tons of ripping programs, some free and some not. Windows programs Flask MPEG and MPEG Mediator are free; free applications for Macintosh include Mac the Ripper and Handbrake. Other ripping programs, for both operating systems as well as Linux, vary in price and sophistication, cost from $10 to perhaps $100 and offer an increasing assortment of options as one moves up the price ladder.

Most webmasters will break the movie into clips, either as scenes or chapters like the original DVD or small 10- to 30-second clips for promotional content. This clipping work can be handled by single-purpose applications - We says that a popular one for chopping up video is Virtual Dub, freeware for Windows - but well-heeled webmasters, like most encoding firms, will use one high-end package for both clipping and editing tasks.

Next comes editing, meaning final editing like inserting watermarks, deleting scenes, etc., at the producers direction. There is lots of software out there. The most popular Windows program is probably Adobe Premiere, definitely not free, followed by Sony Vegas. Adobe Premiere is also available for Macintosh, but takes a second seat to Apples Final Cut Pro. A Google search will unearth many freeware (no-cost) or shareware (low-cost) applications for every computing environment, some of which are surprisingly powerful for the price.

Squeezing those pixels

Now the do-it-yourself webmaster is at a crucial step: encoding. Uptime Video and get exposure music, of course, stays on the cutting edge of hardware, uses custom-made applications and processes jobs in ways that are unlikely to be duplicated by even the most talented Web site proprietors working alone. But everyone has to start somewhere, and even using today off-the-shelf computers with freeware programs can yield decent, sometimes very good, results.

Webmasters must first decide how many formats to produce for streaming. For Uptime Videos clients, we make sure we understand how and where they plan to use their content. For most webmasters, .wmv is the most popular format, followed by .mpg. While .mpg is an older, muddier codes, it is playable through almost all popular media players. Flash video is gaining major momentum for this reason, because regardless of the computer, most browsers have the Flash player installed.

Still, a variety of other formats and codes are being used daily: Real Video, Quick-Time, various flavors of .mpg, .avi and so on. Beginners may find it easier to use dedicated encoders that specialize in creating one format well - Windows Media Encoder for .wmv, Quick-Time Pro for Quick-Time, Flash Video Encoder for Flash video - while more experienced hands (reaching into deeper pockets) can use software bundles like Sorensen Squeeze or Video Charge. With these, users can encode to multiple formats through one piece of software and one interface.

Webmasters need to remember the end-users, too. One Hollywood recording studio spent hundreds of hours perfecting a Web site with Flash motion graphics, audio/video clips and live chat capabilities, all in the mistaken belief that most people have high-speed net connections. The site may have succeeded in South Korea, where about 75 percent of net users have broadband, but the studio owners made their site nearly inaccessible to the seven of every ten American Web surfers still using dial-up connections.

Tomorrow is coming fast

Major content distributors of all kinds still provide low-bandwidth streams to serve all the 56k modems out there. But if the future is now for those webmasters lagging behind Vivid (as many always will), the future for Vivid and other adult content kings is approaching like an onrushing train.

We are already seeing a major shift to flash video because of the flexibility and inherent benefits, and mainstream happens to be ahead of adult in this transition. The video veteran also sees major and widespread implementation of High-Definition (HD) video as well, beginning with the h.264 codes now being used for the newest Apple video Ipods.

We will see more implementations of the h.264 codes in other formats like Windows, including new derivatives and even multi-threaded codes that surpass h.264. Naturally, the proliferation of HD video, coupled with the release of new HD-DVD players, will fuel the continued development of HD encoding, as well as fulfill the need for better compression quality.

Video clips are now being delivered to cell phones, too. But a recent survey by NDP Research indicates the marketing challenge that content creators and distributors face with cell phone delivery (and every other new destination): only 28 percent of cell phones currently in use can handle video streams, and an infinitesimal 1 percent of users currently pay for the service.

Of course, this is just another challenge in a long list of challenges that the envelope-pushing, technology-driving, paradigm-shifting adult entertainment in music industry analyzer has successfully met. And if past successes are any indication, high-quality content deliveries should grow from a stream to a tidal wave in no time.