As I sit here typing away on this corporate blog of ours, I could be saying absolutely anything I want and in just a few moments it will be posted on the internet, it is so simple. Is this news?

Have a listen or a read…

“Through the battlefield smoke of the Wikileaks reports and the fresh news out of federal court in Arizona, a story from last week keeps ringing through the news business. The misrepresentation of Shirley Sherrod as a racist – and her sudden firing, then rehabilitation – has put the media, the news media itself, on trial. What has happened to the quality of this country’s national information flow? Is it poisoned? Is it now, really, propaganda? And whose?”

“Nation Geographic Channels Alien Earths, created by director/producer Dana Berry of Skyworks Digital, has been nominated for an Emmy in the category of Outstanding Animated Program. Point 360 West and animation director Jason Hearne, as well as animation director Dave Jerrard of Radical 3D, worked with Berry creating stunning animated effects of Super Novas and exploding planets adrift in the universe.”

If you have no idea who Hubspot is or what they do, take a look at the list and peruse their site. We’re honored to be at the top of the list.

FIFA World Cup: ESPN3.com (7.4 million unique viewers, 15.7 million hours viewed), UnivisionFutbol.com (10 million hours viewed)

2010 NCAA March Madness: CBSSports.com (8.3 million unique visits to MMOD video player, 11.7 million hours of video and audio)

2009-2010 Sunday Night Football: NBCSports.com (2.2 million unique visits, 1M hours viewed, 29 minutes of average tune-in time)

2008 Beijing Summer Olympics: NBCOlympics.com (70 million video streams, 10 million hours viewed, 27 minutes of average tune-in time)

You can read the entire article with Will’s commentary on his site.

Nearly 2.3 million people tuned in to TMZ.com’s live stream of Lindsay Lohan’s day in court on Tuesday, July 6, in which Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Marsha Revel sentenced the troubled starlet to 90 days in jail and 90 days at an in-patient rehab program.

That’s by far the largest number of live streams ever delivered by TMZ.com. Prior to this, the site’s best days were during a previous Lohan hearing on May 24, in which 845,000 people streamed video on the site, and on June 25, 2009, when Michael Jackson died.

“The interesting thing is that people are typically on the site from five to seven minutes at a time, but yesterday they were on the site for 16.3 minutes,” said TMZ Executive Producer Harvey Levin. “People could literally not take their eyes off this. It was one of the most compelling court hearings I’ve ever seen.”

Personally, I wouldn’t have described it as compelling but anyhow, you can find the rest of the article here.

You can find the paidContent.org article and all of the statistics on their site.

If you’re celebrating your independence this weekend, have a good one.

Now every Friday morning as I listen to StoryCorps on NPR and they say…”you can find an archive of today’s story on the Library of Congress’ web site,” I know my company is playing a role in getting it there.

paidContent ran a great article today that lays out some very interesting statistics. And it seems as if we’re not the only one being asked these questions….

“It’s an appropriate time to compare what we’re doing against the World Cup,”  Alex Balfour, the new media head of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games said, presenting these stats to the Social Media Influence conference in London on Tuesday…

• Competing nations: World Cup: 32 | Olympics: 205

• Athletes: World Cup: 736 | Olympics: 15,000

• Media: 20,000

• Tickets: 9 million

• Venues: World Cup: 12 | Olympics: 170+ venues

“The size of what we’re doing is absolutely enormous,” Balfour said. “Day by day, I get terrified by numbers about the range of things we’re doing. The scale is just absolutely huge.” The last, winter Olympics give an indication…

Vancouver2010.com stats from Balfour…

• 291 million visits (Beijing 2008: 105 million)

• 83 million uniques (Beijing 2008: 70 million – compared with Yahoo’s 32 million, NBC.com’s 20 million)

• Over 50 percent of all Canadians visited the site

• 8.7 million visits to mobile site, 1.25 app downloads

• 1.2 million Facebook fans (Beijing 2008: 320,000)

• “Every post they put on Facebook attracted about 100,000 comments.”

Read the full article on paidContent.org.

LaserNet uses Signiant to speed file transfer

“The is by far the largest event we’ve ever done…” said Kevin Stolworthy, vice president, technology, ESPN.

Read the entire article published in Broadcast Engineering.

12%? For a year?

You read that correctly, if you don’t believe me, you can read the entire story, As Soccer Grows, Passions Rise For World Cup, on NPR’s web site.

Hear how they are using new technology to raise the bar and hide the complexities of online video, and create an entirely new viewing experience for a video-hungry audience.

You can view it by clicking here.

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA
With an estimated worldwide viewership of 1.5 billion, the 2010 FIFA World Cup in Johannesburg, South Africa, June 11-July 12 will arguably be the world’s largest sports broadcast in history.

The greatest challenge broadcasters face is providing all 64 matches from this quadrennial men’s soccer event without any technical glitches. Broadcasters face complex logistics because some of the 10 venues are almost a day’s drive from Johannesburg.

Read the full story.

Today Signiant announced how we’re working with EPIX – yet another extremely cool company in the Media & Entertainment industry to be partnered with.

The service is available to over 30 million homes nationwide through carriage agreements with Verizon, DISH, Cox, Mediacom, Charter and NCTC.

Maybe you have access to a ton of great movies and you don’t even realize it yet.

Learn more by visiting the product section of our web site.

Come find out why we’re more than transport, we’re content supply chain management.

If you’re not yet registered, register on us.

“With hundreds of highlights and more than a thousand hours of coverage, we needed an efficient workflow to bring the Games to Olympic fans,” said Perkins Miller, SVP, Digital Media, NBC Sports and Olympics. “Signiant has been a critical partner in making this process fast and error-free.”

Read the entire Signiant/NBC Olympic press release.

Read the entire story, authored by Tom Ohanian and published on MediaPost.com

There was a great article this past week in Broadcasting & Cable about NBCU’s coverage of the 2010 Olympic games and how it will actually be generated by a significantly smaller staff and a leaner technical operation, a reflection of current economic realities, technology advances and NBCU’s growing expertise in pulling off these massive events. The article can be found here.

And of course here’s an excerpt which includes the role Signiant will once again play in the Olympics…NBCU will again use MediaGrid servers and ProCast IP technology for the Highlights Factory. A MediaGrid in Vancouver will connect to EVS XT[2] production servers to enable fast access to HD media. Edited content will be sent as 50 Mbps MPEG-2 files over AT&T fiber to a second MediaGrid system in New York, which will pump content to new-media delivery outlets under the direction of NBCU’s MICAH internal distribution system (a combination of Rhozet transcoding and Signiant file acceleration technology).

Q: With the new Media Exchange and Media Publish Point [in this release], are you saying that I can send any size files to anyone similar to e-mail?

A: Correct, that’s what I am saying. Media Exchange is a great alternative to e-mail or FTP. Most people are familiar with the pros and cons of FTP, and certainly with e-mail you are going to be limited in the file sizes that you can move. For the folks on the webcast today, I am pretty sure no one is going to tell me that they are not moving large files – and it just can’t be supported with e-mail. So the answer to your question is yes.

Q: With the new Media Exchange integration and with the Central Management function, unlike FTP, do I have a complete log of all files being sent and received by users?

A: Yes, this is really important because recently had a lot of customer meetings at IBC and this is what they asked for. What’s great is you have all these neat features with Media Exchange and Media Publish Point and there is a lot of great work that has been done there for the user interface, but the real key thing that we’ve done here, is now you can upload Media Exchange into a workflow. So you could preset a workflow. For example, if I want to send a file to a location, but before I send it I wanted to transcode it, QC it, watermark it, and then send it. With Media Exchange, used in conjunction with our central manager, we can actually put this all together. So a non-technical user in the field can upload content to this “workflow special,” and when it uploads into the workflow, the manager would grab it, run it through the various processes, and then deliver it to the end user. The end user does not need to know all the details of how this process works, they just need to know to select the file off their desktop and move it up.

Q: Can Signiant send a file to multiple recipients, but with different meta data for each location?

A: Yes, and this is all part of the power of integrating our interface from Media Exchange with our Media Manager. Prior to 8.2, you had a pretty locked down Media Exchange start component. Now you can actually customize that start component and it will prompt you for a lot more information, it’s a much more powerful thing. This is a big takeaway that sometimes people miss. They see the big fancy end user interface functions within Media Exchange, but one thing, if you are using the Central Managers and Media Exchange, there’s a lot of power in connecting those things together.

Watch part 3 of this interview on MacVideo.