"My name is Bond...Teradek Bond."

Video "uplink in a backpack" systems, pioneered by LiveU, have become very popular for use at major-market television stations for live remotes. These systems use multiple 3G/4G broadband wireless connections, as well as Wi-Fi, to send HD-quality broadcast video live from the field for streaming to the Internet, or for live broadcast. LiveU typically rents its systems for $2,500/month or leases them on an annual basis for $1,500/month; comparable systems from TVU and Streambox sell for $25,000 to $40,000 (U.S.).

Teradek, whose Cube was the first device that made live broadcast-quality Wi-Fi streaming from camcorders feasible and inexpensive, has launched a new device called Bond that shrinks the "uplink in a backpack" down to a size that fits on top of a camcorder, and a price that almost any producer can afford. The Bond is designed to be connected to a Cube, and accepts up to five 3G or 4G USB cellular modems. The Cube provides the HD/SD-SDI or HDMI video input for the Bond; some models also provide Wi-Fi output. At the station or streaming end, Sputnik, a Linux-based application reconstructs the bonded video into a single MPEG-TS stream that can be processed with most H.264 decoders.

That's interesting, but not revolutionary: The LiveU, TVU and Streambox systems do essentially the same thing. What makes Teradek's system revolutionary is the price: The Bond's list price is $2,490 (U.S.). A Cube 250 with a HDMI interface and USB output (needed for the Bond) lists for $1,590. Sputnik is free. If you want to use an end-to-end Teradek solution, a Cube 400 decoder outputs to a HDMI interface as well as wired Ethernet, for $1,190. That's a complete, broadcast-quality broadband ENG uplink/downlnk system for $5,270. Depending on whether you rent monthly or annually, that's about two or four month's rental of a LiveU system, and about 20% of the purchase price of a TVU system. You're going to see a lot more live webcasts and broadcasts, thanks to Teradek and its Bond.

Blackmagic Design brings DaVinci color correction to the masses

Talk to any professional colorist, and nine times out of ten they'll tell you that they love DaVinci's color correction systems. Yes, they can use the color correction systems that Avid, Adobe or Apple build into their software, but they don't have the power and flexibility of DaVinci.

About a year ago, Blackmagic Design acquired DaVinci. A lot of eyebrows were raised, since DaVinci systems were very expensive ($150,000 to $200,000 USD to start) and the most expensive Blackmagic Design product to that point was a fraction of the cost of even the cheapest DaVinci system.

At NAB this week, Blackmagic Design announced a $995 software version of DaVinci Resolve for the Mac. Mac buyers need a compatible control surface, such as the Tangent Wave, which costs approximately $1,600 (USD), a supported nVidia graphics card, and a Decklink HD Extreme 3D card for video input. Or, they can opt for DaVinci's own control surface, which adds $29,000 to the price. But for most videographers, they can get into Resolve for under $10,000, even if they don't already own a Mac Pro.

If buyers want to fully replicate the functionality of previous versions of Resolve, they can purchase the Linux version for $19,995 which supports up to 16 GPUs, plus the Resolve control surface for $29,000. By the time you purchase a multi-core Linux workstation (or workstations) with lots of RAM, hard disk and 16 graphics cards, you can hit $150,000, but you've got a system that performs as well or better than DaVinci's previous $800,000 solution.

I'm not a colorist, but I've spent days in a color correction suite with a professional colorist working on an earlier version of Resolve. It's an amazingly powerful tool, and to think that the same basic capability that took an entire room full of equipment five years ago is now available to anyone with a powerful enough Mac is mind-boggling.

Hulu--get successful, shoot self in foot

It's a common story--start-up that initially isn't taken seriously by either its competitors or the industry in general, delivers a great product and turns the industry's perception around. In order to get distribution, the start-up cuts deals with some competitors, and makes it easy for others to redistribute its products. Once the start-up gets successful, however, those partners start to look more like competitors, and it starts pulling back on deals.

That's exactly what's happening with Hulu, the web video start-up that was derisively labeled "ClownCo" by executives at Google, only to become, in some ways at least, a more profitable and popular destination than Google's YouTube. Last week, however, Hulu started pulling the plug on distribution. The first was to take Hulu's content off of TV.com, a site that CBS purchased when it acquired CNET last year. The second was to take Hulu off of Boxee, an increasingly popular web video browser for Linux, OS X, AppleTV and Windows that turns PCs into set-top boxes. Hulu's distribution deal with TV.com was contractual, while there was no formal business arrangement between Hulu and Boxee.

In the TV.com case, Hulu merely stated that it had the contractual right to remove its videos, and was doing so. In Boxee's case, Hulu seemed to be more apologetic, stating that it withdrew its content at the request of its content partners. It's important to note that Hulu's largest owners, with equal control, are NBC Universal and News Corporation (Fox), and to my understanding, it would only take one partner to get Hulu to yank its content. I'm not going to speculate on which partner I think pulled the plug (NBC Universal), because they're both extremely well-run companies with top-notch management teams (and pigs can fly.)

What is happening is that Hulu's actions are getting people to reconsider The Pirate Bay and other sources for the content that's distributed by Hulu. These are unlicensed sources, and not a penny of revenue goes back to Hulu, its parent companies or other affiliated content providers. At precisely the time that Hulu is engaging in a promotional program involving commercials on NBC, Fox and both companies' cable outlets, it's taking actions that curtail Hulu's distribution and encourage piracy.

In Boxee's case. it's entirely possible that it was cable operators that forced Hulu's partners to take the action they did. To these operators, I say that taking Hulu off of Boxee and any other service will not in any way slow down the trend for consumers to drop their cable services. The only thing that will do that is an industry-wide switch to a reasonable a la carte pricing scheme, which will happen fairly close to the heat death of the universe.

In short, Hulu's actions are only going to hurt Hulu. They won't accomplish what either the content providers or the cable operators want--in fact, they'll accomplish the reverse. Joint ventures almost always suck massively--they're impossible to manage, because the participating partners almost always have divergent strategic goals and objectives. I chalk Hulu's behavior up to that.