Live & in HD: Those Other Grammy Awards

Written by Ryan Lawler

Monday, February 9. 2009 at 04:15 PM EST Post a comment

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While most people watched the telecast 51st Annual Grammy Awards starting at 8:00 p.m. ET on CBS last night, there was a whole three hours of non-televised content that viewers could only watch live online.

The Grammy Awards Pre-Telecast, which includes nearly 100 categories of Grammy awards that don't make the televised awards program, was brought online with production and technical expertise from Springboard Productions, iStreamPlanet Co. , Move Networks Inc. , and AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T).

This year marked the second time that Springboard and iStreamPlanet had worked together to stream the pre-telecast program for the Grammys. But for 2009, iStreamPlanet wanted to up the ante, which led to the selection of Move Networks to provide its adaptive streaming video technology.

Move's technology adjusts the video stream to the maximum quality that an end user's connection can support. The video scaled from a minimum bit rate of 32 Kbit/s to 1.5 Mbit/s. 

iStreamPlanet CEO Mio Babic says, "Every time we do something, we try to make it better. So we wanted to produce a better experience than last year, so we engaged with the Move folks to create a much better, TV-quality experience."

The Grammys deal builds on a partnership that saw the Move technology integrated into iStreamPlanet's video management platform. In addition to the Grammys, the companies collaborated for the live streaming of the Democratic National Convention.

The deal is also represents a live Move stream that was delivered directly from the scene using remote encoding facilities from iStreamPlanet. Babic says the live signal was captured and encoded into Move format on-site using its "road encode" system. According to Move vice president of marketing David Rice, this extends the reach of Move's technology, by enabling it to be used in more remote situations.

"This broadens our reach to cover events that we can't cover with satellite and off-site facilities. iStreamPlanet has teams that they can mobilize to pull this off," Rice says.

Also significant is the selection of AT&T as the content delivery network (CDN) for the event. While the carrier announced its intent to compete more aggressively in the CDN space last summer, so far the company has been mum on any deals that it may have won. By showing that it can stream a live event like the Grammys pre-telecast, AT&T may be signaling that larger deals are in the works.