Digital Lava offers way to edit streaming media
The company Tuesday rolled out a new application that it says will let users browse and rearrange Net video as easily as they now manipulate business graphics and text documents, rather than only being able to watch passively.
"If the best thing we can do is to watch television on the desktop, well, there's a better tool for that already," said Digital Lava CEO Joshua Sharfman. "It's called television."
Digital Lava demonstrated its VideoVisor here at the RealNetworks Conference '98, as one of the hundreds of developers who support RealNetworks' streaming-media platform. RealNetworks claims about 85 percent of the streaming media market.
A burgeoning market
"Streaming" refers to a method of transmitting media such as audio or video over the Internet almost instantly. RealNetworks says about 30,000 sites use its streaming technology, up from about 8,000 at this time last year. The company's RealAudio has become a popular way to listen to far-off radio stations, but the technique is also used to distribute corporate information such as training videos over local-area networks (LANs) and IP-based networks.
Digital Lava hopes to appeal to those corporate users, citing research that pegs the corporate training market alone at $60 billion.
VideoVisor lets users browse video clips that are linked to other types of files, such as text transcripts, Web pages or a table of contents.
For example, a user could conduct a keyword search on a text transcript, and then jump directly from the transcript to that part of the video.
Users can also rearrange the video clips simply by changing the order of the table of contents, according to Digital Lava.
'Video publishing'
The so-called "video publishing" system supports all standard file formats, including Quicktime, AVI and MPEG formats. Version 1.5, announced Tuesday, is the first version to support RealMedia. Support for ASF, a competing streaming format from Microsoft Corp., is upcoming, the company said.
Digital Lava, founded in 1995, is privately funded.
The demonstration was one of many at the RealNetworks conference, where a pavilion full of developers demonstrated RealMedia-based applications, mostly for the benefit of Web companies looking to add some audiovisual pizzazz to their sites.