Today, in Times Square Dean Karnazes is going for a world record. In a 24 hour endurance run streamed live online using Flash, he will attempt to break the previous record of 153.76 miles. The video is one of the first examples of live Flash streaming, via Akamai at a bitrate of 300K.

Still in beta everywhere, live Flash has begun popping up in public in recent weeks. One cool way it’s being used is as a component of an ad unit - so that now you can have live video within an embedded banner ad syndicated across multiple sites without the need for a separate player. This is what GE did to promote its online conversation between CEO Jeff Immelt and Arnold Schwartzenegger.

And that is how Accelerade is promoting its sponsorship of Karnazes’ run. While Flash streaming is still being perfected, it holds major advantages over the current alternatives.

In other Flash news, Adobe has released its update to Flash player 9 which includes an enhanced full-screen version and hardware acceleration for viewing high quality video. I’m still awaiting Adobe Media Player, which should be available by end of 2007.

In addition, I’m always looking for live Silverlight streaming but news on Silvelight has been mostly under the radar since the initial media blitz at NAB. Clearly you can do some really cool things with it (it’s a big part of the software running Microsoft Surface), but I haven’t seen many people actually using it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 2:10 pm and is filed under CDNs, News, Streaming, advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.