DEMO 07 - Show launches with video innovators
- 27 September, 2007 10:51
The lights go down, the noise comes up, and Demo 07 is underway.
If the first few demonstrators are any indication, full video without stuttering, breakup, or out-of-sync sound and picture accessed over the Internet is on the way.
Now the TV moguls will have even more to worry about.
First up was Charles Oppenheimer, CEO of Digital Fountain, who demonstrated a new content delivery network using the company's Splash technology.
Oppenheimer never quite got around to explaining how it works but if the demo was a true indication of what it can do, it was pretty impressive.
Showing a surfing video with one percent data loss made the video hard to watch. Oppenheimer cranked up the video loss to 20 percent and at that point the video was unwatchable until Splash was turned on.
We in the audience were able to watch a full motion video that ran without a glitch.
Digital Fountain will launch and license the Splash technology in January.
MotionDSP did them even one better by improving a grainy, awful cell phone video into a very watchable, high quality video.
What the technology, FixMyVideo, did was quite close to what was always unbelievable when seen on television shows like CSI where a dark, impossible-to-see photo is made into something akin to an award winning picture of the bad guy.
FixMyVideo works by aggregating multiple frames to enhance each frame of the video. So, the technology takes a license plate number that may be hard to read in any one particular frame and searches for additional frames that add additional data to the original frame until the license plate number is indeed highly readable.
Among its investors, according to the CEO Sean Varah, is In-Q-Tel - the "independent investment arm of the CIA."
Independent of whom, one would like to know.
Finally, ClipBlast! introduced what it calls a Video Web Search Widget. Maybe ClipBlast! isn't another YouTube but the fact that they've been crawling the Web since 2004 and creating a master index of every video on the Web means they will either rival Google for video search capabilities or get bought.