2011 has been a year of huge video moments. From the global screening of the UK’s Royal wedding, to the US’s equivalent, and from YouTube clips of national uprisings, to televised footage tracking the global Occupy movement—it has all been captured on camera and broadcast around the globe throughout 2011 on an increasing variety of screens.

In the world of RGB Networks, while the landmarks may not have not been as politically significant, there have certainly been many notable moments!

In the last of our blog postings for 2011, we have taken a look back over the year, and rounded up our top ten moments from 2011:

10. The Wall Street Journal ranks RGB as 13th most promising company in the U.S.

RGB was selected from a pool of more than 5,000 eligible start-ups to be recognized as one of the 50 most promising venture-backed companies in the U.S. What a way to begin the year!

9. Showing them what we’ve got

Providing us with the opportunity to meet with old friends and engage with new customers, trade shows are a huge part of RGB’s yearly calendar, but this year’s shows were a particular success. RGB stepped boldly into the mobile market at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona where the announcement of many new video-enables devices helped ensure the future of mobile video. We made a huge splash at IBC with an abundance of operator interest in our multiscreen solutions and extensive coverage in the coveted IBC Show Daily. And we closed out the year with crowds of visitors at the SCTE’s Cable-Tec Expo seeking out help to meet their multiscreen video challenges (and that’s only a few highlights!).

8. Award accolade awesomeness

This year saw a continuation of 2010’s award winning streak with multiple accolades received. From shortlists to award wins, RGB Networks has done it all in 2011. The trophy cabinet is simply bursting at the seams!

7. Adaptive streaming hits its stride

We saw increasing focus on adaptive streaming, with our customers taking significant interest in our TransAct Packager—praised by many operators for its numerous unrivalled attributes—and designing it into their IP video deployments.

6. It’s all about the money

Providers started considering ways in which to monetize their multiscreen offerings. This has ultimately led to an increased interest in advertising and second screen strategies as potential investors consider how to make a viable return on their investments.

5. Accelerated growth

Due to the strong worldwide demand for our next generation solutions, RGB’s lifetime product shipments propelled past $200 million early in the year. The pace of RGB’s growth is accelerating as we completed our second $100 million in shipments in two years compared to over three years for the first $100 million.

4. Making the Forbes top list

RGB’s sustained success was recognized by top business publication, Forbes magazine, with RGB named as one of America’s 100 most promising companies. It’s nice to not only be recognized for our technology leadership, but also for the strength of our overall business.

3. The birth of eVIA

In September, RGB Networks announced the launch of its Enhanced Video Intelligence Architecture (eVIA), a suite of products and technologies that provides for the integrated delivery and monetization of video to multiple screens over adaptive streaming delivery protocols with hyper-targeted ad insertion capabilities. This architecture represents the future of IP video delivery.

2. Customer deployments aplenty

This year RGB Networks was selected by the majority of top U.S. and Canadian cable and telco operators for their trials and deployments of multiscreen services, showing the excellence of RGB’s technology and the company’s strength in IP video delivery. European operators also recognized the advantages of RGB’s unique solutions, with Waoo! and Swisscom Broadcast, among others, going live with RGB-powered multiscreen deployments.

1. Multi-screen, multi-fabulous

Multiscreen solutions dominated industry headlines this year and even reached mainstream tech trends as TV Everyone becomes a common term. As the proliferation of tablet devices continues and consumer video consumption habits change, providers have increasingly become aware of the need to diversify their offerings to incorporate a multiscreen strategy.

And there you have it – our list of our top ten favorite 2011 moments! As always, we invite you to share your thoughts.

We hope you all have a wonderful holiday season and we look forward to welcoming you back in 2012!

OK, so the answer is fairly obvious: over-the-top (OTT) is a thropportunity. That is, it’s a threat that is creating an opportunity for traditional video service providers to offer their subscribers enhanced services and ultimately change a video delivery model that has been in place for decades.

As streaming services from the Hulus, Rokus and Netflixes of the world have gained popularity—with consumers enjoying the ability to watch video anywhere and on any device—the established operators are being forced to expand their offering beyond the television for viewing on iPads, PCs, smartphones and other mobile devices.

The ‘TV Everywhere’ model being undertaken by most operators around the globe—with recent launches by Cox, Rogers and Ziggo—is for operators to leverage the advantages of their managed network to deliver video streaming services with quality superior to what the OTT competitors can deliver piggy-backing on their networks. Simply, operators can apply considerable quality of service (QoS) controls to their own IP streaming services, ensuring adequate bandwidth is provided and that streaming traffic is prioritized. OTT providers have no control over the cable modem service and consequently cannot provide any real quality assurance. Rights issues are still at play in this scenario, but starting with a service confined to subscribers’ homes gives operators an entry into the streaming world as they negotiate rights with content owners to expand for on-the-go viewing.

And as they implement multiscreen IP video services, operators are learning that they can be technically quicker and easier to deploy. On the beta launch of their steaming iPad app, David Purdy, Vice President of Video Products at Rogers told CED Magazine, “The cycle times for innovation are much faster in the IP space, for sure.” He also stated that ultimately Rogers plans to move to all-IP for their entire video offering.

Despite the initial challenges, it is clear that video service providers need to move forward with a multiscreen offering in order to fight off the threat from OTT competitors and take advantage of the benefits of this new model (an added revenue bonus is the opportunity for hyper-targeted advertising that IP video opens up).

CNN just published their list of the top 10 tech trends for 2012, which includes TV Everywhere at #5, showing that this service is going mainstream—a clear sign that operators aren’t backing down from the threat, but instead seizing the opportunity.

The coming year should be an exciting one as we see more operators—large and small—taking control of their destiny. We look forward to continuing to help our customers to maximize the opportunity as they deploy this new generation of IP video services.

We’ve received many honors this year (RGB is Lucky #13 on the Wall Street Journal’s ‘Next Big Thing’ List, SCTE Award Recognizes Adaptive Streaming as a Key Technology, RGB Shortlisted For Two Prestigious Awards, IP Video Drives Company of the Year Finalist Honor, And the Diamonds go to…, eVIA: Another Win for IP Video Innovation at TelcoTV) and as we head into the last few weeks of 2011, we’re very happy to add one more to our list. Forbes magazine recently published their list of America’s Most Promising Companies, and RGB Networks is on it!

This list recognizes “…100 privately held up-and-comers with compelling business models, strong management teams, notable customers, strategic partners and precious investment capital.” Please take a look at the press release for more details.

It’s wonderful to be recognized for your accomplishments within your industry, and it’s even more telling to take home an honor when compared against thousands of other companies on the rise throughout the U.S. in a wide range of industries. The comprehensive approach to compiling the list compared a number of key factors that go into building a great company and our successes over the last several years brought RGB to the top.

We won’t let this go to our heads—we’ll keep pursuing the IP video innovation and sound business practices that got us here—but we’d like to stop to thank everyone that has worked so hard to help us reach this achievement. It takes a strong team of employees, partners, vendors and other supporters—thank you.

Could you use a little help identifying the differences between the three main adaptive streaming technologies and the pros and cons of each? We don’t think you’re alone. Adaptive streaming is rapidly becoming a dominant force in our industry, and with its quick adoption by video service providers, many people may be left feeling that they could use a few more details to round out their knowledge.

To help, we’ve put together an overview comparing Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), Microsoft’s Silverlight Smooth Streaming (MSS) and Adobe’s HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS). This paper includes an overview of adaptive HTTP streaming, discussing delivery architectures, highlighting its strengths and weaknesses, and discussing live and video-on-demand (VoD) delivery; it then delves into each technology, explaining how they work and highlighting how each is different from the others; finally, it looks at specific features and describes how they are implemented or deployed.

Other topics mentioned include: CDNs, DASH, encryption, DRM, packagers, stream latency, targeted ad insertion, transcoders and trick modes.

To download this paper, please click here.