Real player has just announced that they are making some major improvements to the Big Brother 11 live feed system. First off Early Bird specials will be announced next week with a 25% off deal so get ready for that.
I was fortunate enough to talk to Real Networks server representative and she explained the process and some of the exciting new technologies being implemented to the Big Brother 2009 Live Feeds.
Some of the cameras on the Big Brother set have been upgraded to be High Definition.
From Real Networks
“CBS is increasing the quality of the image and sound for the entire show, from the live feeds and CBS broadcast to After Dark. As long as you have enough bandwidth you should see a noticeable increase on your home computer. This high level of realtime compression can only be achieved using Reals Helix system. you will not notice this with Microsoft Media Services, Adobes flash streaming and Apples QuickTime solutions.?
From Real Networks
“We will be rolling out our new HD capable Helix streaming servers early next year and what better way to showcase and test our premiere product than on the Big Brother Feeds.” Some feature we will employing using Reals new helix servers
- – Unicast broadcasting to external audiences
- – Archiving broadcasts
- – multi bit rate real time encoding
- – Time shifting
- – multi camera real-time viewing”
Real networks is offering time-shifting on the Big Brother feeds, what does that mean?
Real captures the live feeds onto their main server straight from the 4 cameras supplied by CBS, these 4 streams are pushed off to Reals edge servers located throughout the continent of North America. From these edge servers the video is uni-casted to your home computer at a bit rate based on your download throughput. When real wants to stream the stored feeds to you each one of these edge servers will have archived the big brother 10 and big brother 11 feeds in their entirety. Their solution is to give you access to a given slot of time where you have free movement forwards and backwards with the option to pause your stream. No data will be stored on your home computer if you request a one hour time slot and want to start 23 minutes the stream will start 23 minutes in, than if you find out some house guest said something crazy 13 minutes in than you can rewind to that point and the stream will begin again. Each individual stream will be delivered to home computers using a variable bit rate
What does this mean to you? Get the feeds find out what hours the cool shit happened from Big Brother 11 Spoilers, dial it in on the real player and watch it. No more sitting around watching Baller scratch his ball sac for 30 minutes.
From Real Networks
“The live feed client has also been given a overhaul, We have noticed a sharp increase in broadband usage so are able to stream out all four cammera views in a thumbnail format. This way you see what?s going on all 4 cameras and can pick which on you would like to view in full resolution.?
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I’m so getting the feeds this year!!! this all sounds so cool
I’m going to get mine early and watch all the bb10 stuff i missed.
this is the best thing they could of added
another site is totally saying that the BB cameras have not been upgraded and BB on CBS/Showtime/livefeeds will be the same standard definition cameras
Some of the cameras have been upgraded to Hi Def, however those cameras will not be used on the live feeds. There is other ways to increase image quality for the live feeds besides just getting better cameras. Real Networks is using a new video encoder which compresses the video feed in real time which in turn your PC decompresses. This means the data travelling on the internets is small. However the work load on the compressing and decompressing side will increase, this is not a problem with current client PC’s because of the rapid increase of computer performance in the last year. Real Networks has developed a new method which they package into the Helix servers which will offer a higher bit rate. Standard Def cameras still produce images at a higher quality than your standard Def TV can handle. So by offering a upconverted video for showtime and CBS viewers people fortunate enough to own a HD TV should see a better image, provided CBS and sHowtime decided to offer it this way.
CBS will most likely use the HD cameras for testing and promotional material as far as I know they will not be used for live feeds, afterdark and tv broadcast. on that note there is only a few HD cameras being installed.
Hope this clears it up…