Open source software can be found powering streaming solutions everywhere. Veterans of the industry on this panel at Streaming Media West, give us their views on how to successfully use open source in on-air projects whilst minimising risk.
The Streaming Video Alliance’s Jason Thibeault starts by finding out how much the panelists and their companies use open source in their work and expands upon that to ask how much the support model matters. After all, some projects have paid support but based on free software whereas others have free community-provided support. The feeling is that it really depends on the community; is it large and is it active? Not least of the considerations is that, in a corporate setting, if the community is quick to accuse, is it right to ask your staff to go through layers of ‘your a newbie’ and other types of pushback each time they need to get an answer?
Another key question is whether we give should back to the open source community and, if so, how. The panels discusses the difficulties in contributing code but also covers the importance of other ways of contributing – particularly when the maintainer is one individual. Contribution of money is an obvious, but often forgotten way to help but writing documentation is also really helpful as is contributing on the support forums. This all makes for a vibrant community and increases the chances that other companies will adopt the project into their workflows…which then makes the community all the stronger.
With turn-key proprietary solutions ready to to be deployed, Jason asks whether open source actually saves money on the occasions that you can, indeed, find a proprietary solution that fits your requirements.
Lastly, the panel talks about the difficulty in balancing adherence to the standards compared with the speed at which open source communities can move. They can easily deliver the full extent of the standard to date and then move on to fixing the remaining problems so far not addressed by the developing standard. Whilst this is good, they risk implementing in ways which may cause issues in the future when the standard finally catches up.
The panel session finishes with questions from the audience.
Watch now!
Speakers
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Steve Heffernan Head of Product Mux |
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Yuriy Reznik Head of Research, Brightcove |
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Rob Dillon Dillon Media Ventures |
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Rema Morgan-Aluko Engineering Dango FandangoNOW |
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Jason Thibeault Executive Director, Streaming Video Alliance |
