News & Insights
Video as a commodity?
Many in the industry bemoan the perceived erosion of professionalism and standards. Who is to blame? Nobody really. Technology’s democratization of the medium has opened a floodgate of content and its providers. Networks, agencies and corporate departments once had...
Amazon’s Elastic Transcoding
Amazon Web Services is at it again. The IT Computing Services shopping center in the cloud has a new offering - Amazon Elastic Transcoding. If you've been looking to distribute videos on your website, and you don't want to use YouTube, or other similar sites for...
The Return of the Rental House
One of my first words of advice to all departing interns for the past 25 years has been “whatever you do, don’t buy equipment.” Now this may sound odd coming from a guy who has been involved with equipment rentals for most of his career, but it is true. Sure, it's...
Being social at 50
I'm a daily user of Facebook, and Twitter. I'm fairly religious about my checkins on Foursquare. And lately I've been initiating connections to every suggested connection I might have through LinkedIn. Google+ gets my attention at very random times. I never post to...
7 things to know about video for social media
A lot of our clients these days consider video to be the most valuable content for their social media channels. It's a smart strategy; research overwhelmingly points to video as the most-viewed and most-shared content on the web. Creating "social video" is a lot...
Do you really need a mobile website?
"Do I really need to have a mobile website?" That's a question we've been hearing from clients a lot lately. And the answer may not always be yes. Let's take a look at some stats from last year. First, consider the overall percent of traffic to sites from mobile...
How On-demand video is driving consumer choices
It used to be people bought stuff that they thought would endure. Then manufacturers came up with something called “planned obsolescence”. Manufacturers don’t want people to replace products because they’re broken, that would decrease the likelihood of any return...
Cloud Services: Are they Secure?
In my last post I talked about the reliability of cloud services and that I believed it was the right choice for Allied Pixel. But what about security? Several days ago, Amazon.com’s homepage was unavailable for 49 minutes. Amazon Web Services, Amazon's cloud...
What You Need to Know About Responsive Web Design
How do you consume the web these days? If you're like most people, you do it from a mobile device. That's right: The majority of web viewing today is done from mobile devices, not desktops. And that is making a profound impact on how we design and build websites. If...
What Kind of Clouds Are Rolling In?
So the other day I was talking to a client who had just gotten back from NAB. When I asked, “How was it?”, she immediately started talking about that nebulous place that we’ve all heard of yet few have actually seen, The Cloud. For some time now, there have been...
Final Cut X: Still the industry standard?
Well it’s been over a year since Final Cut Pro X was introduced and there doesn’t seem to be much resolution to the question of what will be the next “Industry Standard” non-linear editing system. Will Final Cut Pro X rise above the doubts and re-assert Apple’s...
CDN of Choice?
I’m loving Amazon Web Services (AWS)! When we got started in the streaming business a few years ago, we gravitated to Akamai as our CDN of choice. Akamai touted its edge network as the solution to optimized video delivery across the globe. We haven’t been disappointed...