Yospace adds closed captions to Flash streaming

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SDK which allows Flash to interpret HLS streams now meets CEA-608 standard.

NAB 2013, Las Vegas, Booth SU8503: With closed captioning now an FCC requirement in the USA, and a powerful access tool elsewhere in the world, Yospace has announced full support for captions in its live streaming technology, including its unique solution which allows Flash players to display HLS content.

Yospace offers an SDK which allows a Flash player to consume HLS streams, and it is this which is now compatible with CEA-608 captioning. The CEA-608 standard defines the means by which closed captions are embedded within video data as it distributed, either by the means of traditional broadcast or internet streaming.

The result is that broadcasters and content owners can now meet the requirement to caption content online using HLS while using the workflows that exist to embed closed captions in broadcast.

“The support for CEA-608 in Apple devices means that broadcasters can already deliver closed captioning to a wide audience using a workflow they should find familiar,” explained David Springall, CTO and founder of Yospace. “By adding the same support in our Flash SDK for HLS, we have extended that reach to Flash-based players with no further workflow adaptations needed.”

The Flash player SDK, closed captioning, seamless content replacement and other leading edge streaming technologies will be demonstrated on the Yospace stand at NAB 2013, Booth SU8503.

Yospace brings support for HTTP Live Streaming to Flash

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Innovator brings new economies for video publishers with Flash SDK.

Staines-upon-Thames, UK, 6 June 2012: Yospace, a content distribution innovator specialising in the development of unique capabilities in multi-screen streaming, has introduced an HLS Player for Flash. This allows broadcasters and content owners to reduce the number of formats it needs to encode and store, while maintaining service for the huge installed base of Flash users during the transition towards HTML5.

HLS is the video delivery format developed by Apple for its mobile devices which do not support Flash. As well as the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad the format is also used in Android devices and online services like Roku. It is becoming a de facto standard protocol to deliver video into HTML5 environments, the next generation foundation for the web. The development by Yospace is a component that can be added by developers into an existing Flash-based Player to allow it to consume HLS streams natively.

Providers of online media, including broadcasters and on-demand services, are charged by their content delivery networks for the bandwidth to carry content to edge servers and the storage cost of caching content there. This unique development by Yospace reduces the number of formats which need to be distributed, and thus the CDN charges without reducing the service to any consumer. It therefore represents a huge commercial benefit to content providers.

“While the technical press may be full of talk of the transition to HTML5 and thus the demise of the Flash Player, the reality is that this is going to be a long-term process,” said David Springall, chief technical officer at Yospace. “We have developed a solution to allow video publishers to simplify their video production workflow and increase their delivery efficiency by eliminating the proprietary protocols required by Flash without having to turn their back on a player technology that currently reaches the widest possible audience. Over the time period that will see the transition from Flash to HTML5, we believe this technology offers a practical transitory strategy for online video publishers that will deliver real financial advantages.”

The software behind the HLS Flash Player was originally developed as part of Yospace’s advertising replacement system, which allows broadcasters to tailor online streaming of their linear channels to the interests of individual users. The functionality has now been extracted and is available as an SDK for developers to make their Flash Player HLS stream compatible.