Distribution has become an increasingly complex element of the movie business. In times gone by we'd plan, storyboard, shoot, edit, print and distribute. While the tools we use to create our movies, documentaries and other visual artworks have largely taken the same tasks we did before and added a new twist or automation, distribution has changed in ways that were unfathomable. Now, videos need to be "consumable" on everything from a mobile phone to a big screen TV.

Viocorp started life as a video production house and faced that very same challenge - how to get content out, ready for a variety of different playback media, quickly. That lead them to developing their own platform for quickly distributing their work. Viostream is Software as a Service, or SaaS. Rather than the most common software model where we pay a large upfront fee, Viostream is sold as a monthly subscription.

Using Viostream, businesses are able to embed video streams into a website. While that can be done using free options such as YouTube, Viostream allows you to use your own branding. Nick Bolton, Viocorp's Head of Marketing, says that "it takes all the good stuff from YouTube but gets rid of all the bad stuff from YouTube. You get all the categories, channels, the ratings but there's no YouTube branding and it works straight away."

Video output from Viostream can be in high and low resolution versions using Windows Media, Flash and QuickTime in streaming, progressive and download formats. While you might not need all of these variations choosing the ones you want is a simple matter of choosing the output format.

One way to look at Viostream is to see it as a processing system. You create movies such as TV commercials, documentaries or in-house video. You send it to Viostream and it comes out ready for websites, intranets, extranets, mobile phones or almost any other viewing platform.

One of the great challenges that needs to be overcome with video streaming is bandwidth. Viostream goes some way to overcoming this by using Akamai as part of its backend service. Akamai transparently mirrors content so that users can receive content from whichever Akamai server is closest to them or has the fastest connection. Typically, if we distribute content from our own servers, our processing and network capability become bottlenecks. By transparently mirroring content Akamai spreads the load.

While all this might sound complex, Viocorp have developed significant automation within the process. For example, in some scenarios it's possible to send your finished footage straight to Viostream and literally push one button for the content to be published in versions that are mobile phone, iPod and PC friendly. If you use a Content Management System it's even possible to automate the connection between the Viostream and your CMS.

A good example of how that automation works can be seen at the Macquarie Radio website. There you can see many different video segments that have been prepared and distributed using Viostream. Clicking on one of the videos, you'll note it appears quickly and that there's no hint that the movie is using a third party service provider.

Until recently, Macquarie was running a service called Live News. They were using Viostream's auto-ingest functionality to grab news and other footage directly from TV networks, under licenses, and then distributing them online.

EyeOnQ is an initiative the Tourism Queensland. EyeOnQ pulls together video content from lots of different sources, including user-generated content, making it a one-stop shop for anyone considering a holiday in the Sunshine State. However, rather than using embedded video, EyeOnQ uses Viocorp's web TV system called VioTV.

The number of applications for VioTV is boundless. While it seems a natural fit for sports (take a look at tv.rugby.com.au or raboplus.com.au) we were intrigued to see stock-market updates over commsec.viotv.com and marketing campaigns like Riva Coffee (www.rivastakeout.com.au). What you'll notice on those sites is that the video player has been skinned so that it looks like part of the site and not some sort of embedded afterthought. We saw Viostream's capability in action early in 2009 at a conference where some of the presentations were filmed and made available later that day.

Along with all the benefits you'd expect like full-screen playback, thumbnails, playlists, polling and commenting, VioTV includes a social networking element. This makes it easy for your potential audience to know when new content is published and to tell their friends when they see something of interest.

By Anthony Caruana

With a diverse educational background of biological science, education, information systems and theology, Anthony Caruana drifts between being the "most technically literate end user and least technically focussed IT expert". For Anthony, the technology is all about how we can get the most from it rather than entering into pissing contest about the fastest processor, biggest hard disk or most RAM.

With three young kids, the video and photography bug has bitten hard. Anthony shoots, edits and publishes several videos each year of various school productions as well as the occasional instructional video. Most of this work is done on a couple of Macs running in his office as well as MacBook Pro that is almost always in a bag hanging off Anthony's shoulder.

As well writing for auscam and a number of other publications and newspapers, Anthony works full time as a project manager in the energy industry, studies part time, delivers corporate presentations and is addicted to chocolate. His personal blog, that isn't updated nearly as often as it should be is at www.pocketmojo.net