Digital Fountain, a video infrastructure company that’s been demoing a high-quality video CDN and software package for a while now, has signed its first customer, the auto-racing channel SPEEDtv.
Fremont, California-based Digital Fountain’s new DF Splash is an end-to-end video streaming product. On the consumer side that means an experience similar to what you’d see from Move Networks customers like ABC.com. We’re happy to see competition in this space if it means more flexible delivery of higher quality content.
DF Splash, which makes use of Amazon’s EC2 for pay-as-you-go computing and H.264 encoding, is limited like Move in that it requires a download so it can manage video transmissions from the user’s computer. While DF Splash is rather speedy about navigation and video loads, it also has other limitations; it’s only available for Windows XP now. A Vista version isn’t due for a few more weeks and a Mac version won’t come until summer (despite the mockup in the pic above). If you have the right setup, check the demo here. DF Flash works for bitrates of 500 Kbps and above.
Digital Fountain’s Scott Monson, who leads the business side of the CDN product, emphasized his company’s expertise in reliable IPTV transmissions. “It’s not just about the pixels. It’s not just about the speed. It’s what happens when you have packet loss or latency issues on the web. When the network fluctuates we fix it.”
The SPEEDtv deployment, which is supposed to launch later this month, will only contain clips because of existing affiliate arrangements. Also, the channel only recently started filming in HD. It’s a nice start, but Digital Fountain is going to need to hook some bigger fish if it wants to compete.
Disclosure: Digital Fountain advertises on NewTeeVee, but neither I nor the rest of the editorial team had nothing to do with that arrangement.
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