I’m not at the NAB show this year, but I’ve been keeping an eye on all the news and have already seen more than 700 releases from vendors at the show. I’ve sorted through them and pulled out all the ones having to do with the streaming and online video industry and not surprisingly, 4K and video workflow are the hot topics this year, along with transcoding and HEVC.

Here’s the roundup from releases put out over the weekend and on Monday. If I didn’t include your company’s release, send me a link to it in email. Acquisition news is at the top of the list, all the others are listed in no particular order.

• Imagine Communications Acquires Digital Rapids
• Dalet Acquires Amberfin – Purchase Strengthens Dalet’s Leadership In Media Asset Management
• Level 3 Introduces Video Cloud Services
• Cisco and Sony Collaborate on Industry-First Public Demonstration of 4K Live Streaming at NAB 2014
• Harmonic Partners With Encoding.com on Cloud-Based Transcoding Service for Professional Video Applications
• IneoQuest Revolutionizes Video Analytics for Adaptive Streaming Content with the Release of Audience Measurement Platform
• Wowza to Enable High-Quality Live Streaming of DivX HEVC Video Content to Multiple Screens
• MobiTV Selects Elemental for Live and On-Demand Video Processing
• Level 3 Teams With Elemental Technologies To  Conduct First Real-Time 4K Stream of Sony Content in MPEG-DASH Using HEVC Video Codec
• DivX Launches DivX HEVC End-to-End Solution for Creation, Protected Delivery and Multiscreen Playback of Over-the-Top 4K Video at NAB 2014
• At the Forefront of 4K: Intelsat, BT, Ericsson, Newtec and Sony Demonstrate Next Steps to Make True 4K UHDTV a Commercial Reality
• RGB Networks Advances Cloud-Based Ad Insertion and nDVR Solutions at NAB 2014
• Kaltura Releases Smart Video Monetization Suite
• ATEME Unveils Advancements in Support of HEVC Video Compression at NAB 2014
• Dune HD Shows New HEVC-Enabled Set-Top Box At NAB 2014
• NanoTech Adds to its NAB 4K Streaming Interop-Demo List
• AllDigital Integrates DivX Plus Streaming Technology into Leading Cloud Solution for Content Distribution
• MainConcept Expands Support for XAVC Format to Industry-Leading Video Codec SDK
• Aframe Delivers New Products and Cloud-Enabled Broadcast, News & Sports Video Workflows at NAB 2014
• Elemental Announces Full Integration with Virtualized Encoding Solution
• Levels Beyond and Adobe Expand Collaboration to Power End-to-End Management of Digital Content
• Akamai Cloud Workflow Successfully Completes MPAA Security Assessment
• Brightcove Introduces New Monetization Opportunities for Broadcasters through Enhanced Support for Twitter Amplify and Twitter Video Cards
• Cisco Announces Videoscape Virtualized Video Processing – Adds 4K and HEVC Capabilities and Improved Compression
• Azubu Partners with Brightcove to Deliver and Monetize High-quality Video on Any Screen
• Harmonic Redefines Future of Video Production and Delivery with VOS Technology at NAB
• One Device for Everything: WebTuner Delivers Live TV, On Demand and Streaming Video via the Internet
• Advantech Unveils New Platforms for HEVC Processing Leveraging KeyStone™ II Architecture from Texas Instruments
• Verimatrix Shares Insights on UHD Revenue Security Requirements and Considerations at NAB Show 2014
• Digital Rapids Announces New Enhancements and Configurations for Transcode Manager 2 and the Kayak Workflow Platform
• Samsung Adopts Leading DivX HEVC Solution in Wide-Ranging Renewal of Multi-Year Licensing Agreement
• Envivio Debuts Cloud-Based Video Processing Solutions
• Vantrix Open Sources Free HEVC Encoder
• Fraunhofer HHI Presents High-Efficiency, Full HD, Real-Time HEVC Encoding and Decoding at NAB 2014
• OnLive Selects Industry-Leading Interra’s Vega H264 Analyzer
• Hibernia Networks Launches Its Content Delivery Network (CDN) Platform
• Ericsson Simplifies Stream Processing With Powerful New High Density Platform
• InterDigital to Feature Next Generation Video Streaming at NAB Show 2014

If you’re looking for a theme at NAB this year, look no further than media management and the video ecosystem as being the hot topics. Imagine Communications, formerly called Harris Broadcast, announced it has acquired privately held Digital Rapids. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but I put the price above $100M. Digital Rapids had about $35M in revenue for 2013, so if their projected 2014 revenue was given a valuation of about 3x, which seems to be the average in the space right now, that puts the deal between $100M-$150M in size. Digital Rapids specializes on helping broadcasters with their ingesting, encoding, transcoding and broadcast workflow.

Imagine Communication has confirmed that Digital Rapids President and CEO Brick Eksten along with his management team will be joining Imagine Communications. Specifically, Brick will lead efforts for a significant portion of their next generation cloud-based workflow platform. Digital Rapids has a main location in Toronto, which is less than five miles from Imagine Communications existing Development Center and the majority of Digital Rapids employees will move to the Imagine Communications facility nearby. Imagine Communications said the vast majority of Digital Rapids employees are engineers who will support key R&D developments underway at Imagine, but also included are customer support, key sales, and other employees.

Imagine Communications acquisition of Digital Rapids now gives the company high-end media processing applications that will strengthen their TV Everywhere business, which seems to be getting more traction as of late. Imagine Communications has made a lot of moves over the past few months and is an interesting company to keep an eye on. I suspect the company has one or two smaller acquisitions they are working on to further strengthen their video workflow platform for broadcasters.

As NAB kicks off, we’re seeing a number of exciting deployments of cloud-based digital media solutions. From a trend of conceptual trials and early announcements last year, this indicates a remarkable, and remarkably fast, maturing of the industry. Cloud is solving real pain points for the M&E industry which is still struggling to come to terms with the volume, fragmentation and technological complexity that ubiquitous video gives rise to.

From a research perspective, Frost & Sullivan has released a new study called “Global Media and Entertainment Solutions on the Cloud”. We’ve taken an in depth look at five verticals where the cloud is most impacting M&E applications today – transcoding, media asset management, animation, B2B productivity workflows, and niche services such as captioning and metadata insertion. A brief summary of its findings are available here.

One source of confusion we’ve seen in the market is that cloud is still used as a nebulous term for three distinct use cases – deployments within a private data center (so-called virtualized execution), deployments in a public data center (in other words using Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS) and pay-as-you-go service licenses (in other words Software as a Service or SaaS). The two former use cases are influencing product designs away from dedicated hardware and appliance form factors towards software form factors that are more amenable to virtualization.

The growth in SaaS is more fundamentally transforming the industry by lowering barrier to entry for smaller or less technology-savvy media companies, lowing barrier to entry for any size of media company looking to establish new, experimental or short-term services, and by dramatically reducing total cost of ownership of a wide range of online video services while also providing scalability, flexibility and agility. However, for solutions to optimally deliver on the promise of the cloud, it is critical that they be architected from the ground up for the cloud. On-premise products that are ported naively to the cloud cannot deliver reliability if for example virtual machines need to be rebooted or a network connection goes down. Such products will also be less able to intelligently spin distributed computing resources up and down in response to fluctuating workloads.

While the total revenues accrued under the SaaS model for media and entertainment applications are in the neighborhood of $100 million in 2013, we expect this to rise explosively quickly, approaching the billion dollar mark by 2020, driven not only by a compelling value proposition but also by rapidly maturing solutions and improved market awareness. To more closely gauge how media and entertainment companies are harnessing the cloud today and anticipating using it in the future, we also embarked on a consumer-facing research initiative. Specifically, we spoke with senior executives in marquee programmers and broadcasters, both in the USA and in the UK, to discuss their perceptions of the cloud and its role in their strategic growth initiatives. While there is clear recognition of the value and power that cloud-based solutions bring to a media company’s fingertips, there also remains some hesitation in wholehearted adoption of the cloud that stems from historical perceptions – relating to concerns which we feel are being quickly resolved as technology and commercial offerings evolve.

These findings are published in our new white paper, “Empowering Multiscreen Workflows through the Cloud“, which debunks four key pitfalls media companies often fall into when considering the cloud for deploying online video offerings. The paper also discusses our suggested best practices for success in a cloud-based video ecosystem.  It does so in the context of real world case studies derived from our research.  Further, we examine concrete business benefits that cutting edge cloud-based solutions such as Aventus from iStreamPlanet can bring to a modern media business aspiring to succeed in the new online world order. Aventus powered NBC’s recent online video offerings for the Sochi Winter Olympics in a definitive showcase of the production-grade capabilities of today’s cloud based media workflow solutions. A copy of the white paper can be downloaded from www.istreamplanet.com/nab-2014/frost/.

We’re expecting to see continued innovation in bringing cloud-based workflows to market. Online video is going to continue to grow, as are annual shipments of connected video devices. New devices and services that aim to make it easier for consumers to find and consume online content will continue to emerge at rapid pace – such as Amazon’s recent Fire TV announcement. The cloud will accordingly become more and more critical to helping media companies realize the monetary potential of this ecosystem while remaining competitive and differentiated in a fiercely fought market.

I’ve gotten my hands on a bunch of Amazon Fire TVs and will be giving them away to some lucky readers of my blog. We’ll also be giving them away at the Streaming Media East show in May as well. To win one from my blog, simply add a comment to this post and I’ll pick a winner at random in two weeks. I will only ship these within the U.S. so you must have a U.S. based address if you want to win. Good luck!

If you want to get a jump on your speaker submission for the Streaming Media West show, taking place November 18-19 at the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach Resort and Spa in California, the call for speakers is now open. The submission deadline is July 30th and the advance program will be published on August 1st.

With the launch of Amazon’s $99 streaming box, the company has added a chart on their website that compares their box against the Roku 3, Apple TV and Chromecast devices. By the looks of the chart, it seems as if Amazon’s box comes out on top with more features, but that’s not accurate. Amazon has skewed the chart to only highlight what they want and has left out things their box does not support. If they are going to make a chart that compares boxes, then they should make it real and give consumers all the info, not just selected info.

Amazon says their box allows you to “access all the entertainment you love” and “comes with instant access to all of the most popular subscription video services”, but apparently they don’t think anyone loves sports. Amazon’s box does not support live streaming services from MLB, NHL, NBA or MLS, but of course they don’t list those content services on their comparison chart under “popular services”. Because if they did, Roku would have a check box on all of them and Amazon’s box wouldn’t. [Updated 8:06pm ET: Amazon’s press release says that MLB.TV and WWE Network are “coming soon”. ] They also don’t call out the fact that their box has no current support to play back content from a USB source, something Roku can already do. The Roku’s remote also includes a headphone jack so you can listen to the audio in private, at any volume you want, but Amazon’s box does not have that functionality. Roku also has a version of the box that works on older TVs, with Amazon’s box only working on TVs with HDMI.

Amazon’s box has some nice features, but Amazon owes it to consumers to fairly compare the boxes and not simply limit the info they present in the chart to selected details.

Amazon’s $99 streaming box, dubbed “Amazon Fire TV” is now available for sale on Amazon’s website and while it has potential as Amazon adds more functionality to it over time, it’s no Roku or Apple TV killer today. During Amazon’s presentation they said the current gaming consoles in the market are too expensive, but their box is not competitive to Sony’s or Microsoft’s and they are fooling themselves if they think otherwise. No serious gamer is getting Amazon’s box, which has no online multiplayer service, something that most Xbox’s and PlayStation’s are used for. Amazon’s streaming box would be great for casual gaming, but that’s it. Even from the gaming demos they showed off it’s no where near what games look like on the Xbox One or PS4.

Right now, the only content on the box, that matters, is from Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon, ESPN, Showtime and YouTube. Missing is HBO Go, MLB.TV, NHL GameCenter, NBA League Pass, Epix, Vudu, SlingPlayer, Major League Soccer, Redbox, WWE Network – all content services that Roku’s boxes currently have. While more content will come to Amazon’s box over time, we don’t know how much content it will get or how quickly it gets it. For some segment of the market, cost is the biggest factor and Roku has a box in the market that’s only $50 and works with older TVs, something Amazon’s box does not do. So some consumers will pick the Roku simply because it is cheaper than Amazon’s streaming box, when cost is the primary factor in their decision. [Updated 8:06pm ET: Amazon’s press release says that MLB.TV and WWE Network are “coming soon”.]

That’s not to say that we should count Amazon out as they have tremendous marketing power and the ability to sell a lot of these boxes very quickly simply due to all the eyeballs they have to their website. I expect Amazon to sell millions of them this year, but they aren’t doing it to make money from the hardware and their business model with Amazon Fire TV is clear. Just like their Kindles, Amazon is selling the hardware at a loss to make money on the digital content services consumed via the boxes. If it was just about anyone else in the market coming out with yet another $99 streamer, I’d say it was pointless. But in Amazon’s case, because of their diversified business model and marketing reach, it’s necessary for them to have their own streaming box.

Updated 2:52pm ET: Engadget’s hands-on experience with the box involved “noticeable delay between making selections and the next page loading” for Hulu Plus and that gaming was “not exactly perfect” with “noticeable lag when it came to input.” Amazon has posted a video that shows some of the upcoming games for the box and they are crazy  if they think the video quality rivals the Xbox One or PS4.