Inlet, which was founded in 2003, makes equipment that is used by the BBC as well as Major League Baseball for its MLB.tv online streaming service. The company’s gear also helped power the NBC’s online streaming of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

But the real gem in the deal for Cisco is Inlet’s “adaptive bitrate technology” (ABR). The company’s Spinnaker transcoding appliances for livestreaming use this technology to dynamically adjust the video stream to the end-user’s bandwidth and device capabilities in real-time. Cisco plans to use if to beef up its offerings for over-the-top delivery capabilities as it rolls out Videoscape solution, the new Cisco effort announced at CES 2011.

As more consumers watch video online — and service providers look to provide online video streaming to accompany their traditional pay TV services — ABR becomes important, because the technology helps eliminate delays as it adapts the video stream to the conditions of the network. The first company to gain attention for using the technology was Move Networks, but as Microsoft and Adobe announced similar technology, and Apple implemented its own, Move was pushed aside.

Inlet  has seen significant interest in its Spinnaker appliance because it is optimized for handling Apple’s version of ABR. The company was involved early with Apple, and because of this, was one of the first companies to enable ABR for iPhone delivery. This, and deals with Microsoft to power early implementations of its Smooth Streaming ABR, helped Inlet gain more momentum and was likely one of the key considerations for Cisco in the deal.

This isn’t the first acquisition by Cisco in support of its broader Videoscape product suite. Last year, they acquired Extendmedia, an online video video platform player that’s now the centerpiece technology for Cisco Videoscape’s content management system.

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The integration of mDialog’s video ad platform with Inlet’s Spinnaker encoder increases mDialog’s already big bet on providing an ad solution for Apple’s portfolio of mobile devices. The company has been focused on delivering ads to iPhone apps for years, but has picked up some traction with the iPad, which doesn’t support Adobe’s Flash and thus doesn’t support any of the Flash video ad tools that have been developed over the last several years.

To date that has mainly meant serving up ads against on-demand videos, but mDialog is taking its iOS expertise one step further by integrating live video functionality. The partnership with Inlet will enable video publishers pushing live sports events, concerts and the like to serve interactive ads into those streams as well. The partnership also gives content producers the ability to take advantage of mDialog’s just-announced in-stream apps capability in live video feeds, enabling advertisers to directly engage with users while they are watching full-screen videos. In addition to ad- and app-serving, mDialog also offers detailed analytics for videos served in iOS devices.

The introduction of interactive advertising tools from companies like mDialog should help increase publisher interest in serving to HTML5 video players and in-app video feeds on devices that get no benefit from the work done in creating interactive ad formats in Flash video players. By giving publishers more ways to monetize and track video views on iOS devices, mDialog and others are helping to make more video available on the iPhone and iPad.

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Today, the U.S. Olympic video tech team is being formally named (though we’ve written quite a bit about some of their participation already). Here’s the full roster:

iStreamPlanet is taking the live video feeds from NBC in New York and feeding them through the stream preparation process. Inlet Technologies‘ Spinnaker will encode each stream into six different bitrates for Microsoft’s IIS Live Smooth Streaming and send them to Microsoft’s Windows Servers. Akamai will deliver and cache the content around its network. Viewers will tune into a version of the Silverlight player customized by Vertigo, which brings in a data feed from Deltatre for play-by-play and stats. Conviva contributes monitoring software to immediately report any issues with the streams to NBC and Microsoft.

While Akamai and Microsoft are established giants, that’s mostly a list of startups, which seems fitting given the Olympic spirit of amateur competition. From what we’ve seen, these companies are the best of the best in live streaming.

What does that mean for viewers? In addition to a more stable platform, higher quality video (full 720p) and a better experience provided by adaptive bitrate streaming that adjusts to fluctuating bandwidth conditions, streaming improvements over the last Olympic Games in Beijing include features such as fast-forward, rewind and slow motion capabilities and the ability to jump to key moments within an (on-demand) stream. There will be 23 different video feeds: nine venue feeds, four broadcast feeds, one Olympic News Channel, six “Beauty Cams,” two victory ceremonies and one press conference.

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The HSN Shop App lets users browse and shop the network’s catalog of more than 35,000 items. Watch HSN live anytime day or night, or use the interactive “Shake2Shop” to pull up a random product just by shaking your device. And if you see an age-defying beauty cream you simply must have, now not only can you only order it by calling in, but by purchasing it directly through the browser.

The HSN video encoding is powered by Inlet Technologies’ Spinnaker live-streaming appliance. Spinnaker supports Apple’s HTTP adaptive streaming, a hot topic we’ve been following closely. As Liz wrote earlier:

HTTP streaming enables publishers to give users a better video experience by employing adaptive streaming techniques, something other players such as Microsoft, Adobe Systems, Move Networks and Swarmcast already offer (though Adobe uses a more traditional proprietary real-time streaming protocol to do so, rather than sending chunks of video over standard HTTP like the others). That means that watchers can enjoy a continuous, smooth video experience. The stream intelligently adjusts to the highest quality a viewer can receive at each moment. If the connectivity worsens, a lower quality stream is substituted without interruption or buffering.

(Get the full low-down on adaptive streaming over at GigaOM Pro, our subscription research service.)

Inlet has been on a bit of a tear recently, getting deals with Turner Sports, the MLB and helping deliver the first live event streamed to the iPhone.

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Indy 500 race day on May 24 merited 36,514 streams, a new record for its production team, including 8,000 concurrent streams for the majority of the race. But by comparison, NBC and USOpen.com had more than 4 million streams of the U.S. Open in golf last year, and CBSSports.com and the USOpen.org had 300,000 users for last year’s tennis final (both events were helped by being on a Monday, when people were at work). The web broadcast of March Madness had 7.52 million unique visitors this year.

We talked with Jarrod Krisiloff, director of multimedia platforms at Indianapolis Motor Speedway Productions, to get a better idea of Indy 500′s approach to the web.

Since the race was shown for free on broadcast TV on Memorial Day weekend, the Indy 500 webcast didn’t exactly fill a massive unserved need. The webcast itself was a poor man’s version of the broadcast production, however. Where the broadcast utilized 65 cameras, including 12 in-car, as well as commentators, pit reporters and graphics, the web version had four in-car cameras and a helicopter view of the track. “The user really drives the experience,” said Krisiloff (who of course would choose that metaphor!). But he admitted, “It’s difficult for people to understand the broadcast rights. “The fans think the fans should be served.”

In past years, a company called MediaZone bought rights to stream the race for a $9.99 fee, but Krisiloff said IMS was forced to look elsewhere when MediaZone went out of business (according to the company’s former PR firm it slimmed down its offerings and moved to South Africa). This year, IMS used a pieced-together solution that included encoding from Inlet Technologies and streaming from Conviva for four races (so far) including the Indy 500, as well as other events such as press conferences and banquets.

“It was by far the most successful event we had for the application,” said Krisiloff. But since the streams were offered for free (with registration) and did not feature advertising, success just meant no conked-out feeds, video encoding issues or major lost data from cars. The only hiccup was when car telemetry was lost after antennas broke in an accident. And stuff like that just adds to the feeling that you’re in the thick of the action.

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Time Warner Expanding Metered Broadband; details are few, but more cities to face the cable company’s stingy policies — better watch what you download. (GigaOM)

Nearly Half of U.S. Internet Users to View UGC Vids by 2013; this is up from 36 percent in 2008. (eMarketer)

NaviSite Hooks Up with EdgeCast Networks; partnership will yield a new portfolio of CDN-based services such as caching, electronic file delivery, streaming, API tools and support. (emailed release)

Italian Judge Suspends Decision in Google Video Case; Criminal Court of Milan pauses to consider procedural issues (it’s a common occurrence), proceedings to continue Feb. 18. (see our previous coverage) (The Privacy Advisor)

Commercials Make TV More Enjoyable? New NYU study finds that people who watched TV with commercial breaks included rated their experience higher. Huh? (The Live Feed)

Matt Smith Joins Inlet Technologies; Smith was previously with Yahoo and is now the senior director, systems architecture for the encoding company. (release (PDF)

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