Serious geek alert: We may lose a lot of you with this article. But if you are a multicast streaming expert, we have a new capability - recognized just last week with a 2009 Editor's Pick from Streaming Media Magazine - that will knock your socks off.

Name: Accordent Multicast In-Stream Technology (AMIT).

What it does:  (AMIT) is an advanced technology that enables any company that has deployed multicast-enabled networks to deliver high-quality streaming video with synchronized slides and graphics as a single, compressed stream. By distributing the slide data through the single multicast stream, AMIT offers significant bandwidth advantages over traditional, rich media webcasting.

How it works:  AMIT uses a portion of the multicast Windows Media stream to distribute the slide content as embedded data. The slide data is essentially "downloaded" simultaneously alongside the video and audio stream and is displayed outside of the video player in an image object within the interface HTML page. Contrast this single stream against the traditional approach of delivering slide content via unicast requests from every concurrent viewer:  a live webcast with 3,000 concurrent viewers requires a web server infrastructure in place and bandwidth capable of serving 3,000 requests for each slide throughout the presentation. In contrast, with AMIT, you only need increase the overall bandwidth by 250-350kb in order to allow for the images while maintaining the video and audio quality.  

What you need: AMIT works with Accordent rich media creation products. These products create jpeg images that are loaded on a web server for retrieval and synchronization. The local location of the jpeg images are sent to the AMIT platform each time the application synchronizes an image. The images are then encoded directly into the Windows Media stream at the audio & video encoder at the point of origination, and time-stamped. The image data rides along the stream through the streaming server and then out into the multicast network as a single, multicast stream. Remote clients tune into the multicast stream and receive the audio & video streams. The image data downloads on the local PC and is available for display when called. The Accordent software manages synchronization of the video stream and slide image. This approach eliminates the need for individual slide requests from a web server. If you have network segments that are not multicast-enabled, then those users can simply use a unicast connection to a web server as they have done in the past.

AMIT White Paper:  Marketing research firm Interactive Media Strategies was similarly impressed with the AMIT development.  We've made a copy of their white paper available for you in our Resource Library.