Leave it to Silicon Valley to beat television broadcasters at their own game.
San Mateo-based Virage (Nasdaq: VRGE), which specializes in online video streaming software, Monday demonstrated its wireless on-demand streaming video service to a high-speed handheld device at the National Association of Broadcasters Convention in Las Vegas.
Using NHL.com‘s Stanley Cup Playoffs video highlights site as a testing ground, Virage engineers showed how they could search, browse and select video clips from several locations on the exhibit floor on a Compaq iPaq PDA using a wireless LAN.
Needless to say, seeing people walk around with the PDAs checking out Stanley Cup Playoff footage was a thrill to see say Virage and NHL executives.
“This demonstration is an excellent example of how a platform like this will allow us to extend coverage of the NHL,” says NHL senior VP Doug Perlman.
The software, known as an Internet Video Application Platform, distributes video content via IEEE 802.11 or wireless LAN standard networks. The video in the demonstration was stored on servers at Palo Alto-based Generic Media Publishing Service, a Virage partner.
“The emergence of the Internet allowed Virage to take video out of the living room,” says Virage chief marketing officer Carlos Montalvo. “The evolution of high-speed wireless networks now allows us to remove the final remaining barriers between users and the information that they need.”
Virage says its Application Platform also gives its customers the ability to publish a piece of video and distribute it in multiple formats and bitrates that match the user’s wireless device.
In a separate but related announcement, Virage says it is expanding the capabilities of its video encoding software, known as SmartEncode, to include support for foreign languages and third party plug-ins. Virage’s open platform through plug-ins include
Cobion, FastTalk, Vela and X-Art.