A good demonstration should both spark and answer many questions. We intend to do both. Many of your questions have not even surfaced because Neokast is a new technology. We are not the top down CDN that currently dominates the distribution of short video clips. We are also more sophisticated than even the distributed grid networks. Neither of these tech strategies provide the competitive advantages for content publishers and content viewers that Neokast does.

Lets look at the questions people are afraid to ask about online video distribution…

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Neokast will be at Table 1309-Z at the Video on the Net conference in San Jose, CA from March 19-22. If you are in the area please stop by and see what Neokast can do for you. We are very much looking forward to displaying our technology.

There are two ways that I see this question…

1) How does a content publisher create and market a video to make it popular?

2) How do we, as a content marketplace, define a popular stream?

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I’m sure many of you are thinking:

“I have seen high bitrate streams (e.g. 800k) at every major news and games site streaming to 1000s of people. So what!?!”

How many of these news and games sites allow you personally to stream live (keyword: live), high-quality (not webcam) video? NONE. These companies paid an incredible price to have that ability.

We are offering that same service to you, the consumer, for free.

Neokast is not the sole generator of “good” quality streams. Anyone can provide such a service with the right team, equipment, and millions of dollars. But we do provide the ability to deliver your video for low cost.

Producing high quality live streams will be highly dependent on your bandwidth. If you do not have the bandwidth to stream “it” live, then it can be uploaded into our archive, from where everyone should be able to stream it.

Neokast will provide you with 3 options when it comes to viewing or posting live streams:

1. Through our home site. You can create, view, and search for live streams. All viewing and publishing functionality will be ready to go - no additional software required.

2. Don’t want to use a browser? You can download and use our player which will be completely separate from the website. It will be entirely possible to view, search, and publish streams simply through the standalone player. Others can go on the website or use another player to watch your stream.

3. Do you have a great idea and want to make money off of it using our technology? Go right ahead! We empower you to do so. We can provide you with the website tools to place an embedded player on your own website. You can stream directly to your own website with the same Neokast quality you’ll be accustomed to. People will have to go to your site to see your stream. We’re just there to make that happen for you.

Remember, it’s live streaming. Plug your camera in and post your stream. Capturing, storing, encoding, and slowwwwly uploading your video to a central site is antiquated.

Your stream posting will be nearly instantaneous. Last but not least, don’t worry about the quality - we’ve got it covered!

We are currently testing stream publishing and consuming at many variable bitrates. The lower bitrates are extremely stable and scalable regardless of the user’s resources. The high bitrate was the highest quality Internet video we had ever seen. Even streaming with full screen, we were able to get quality the same as a DVD. With smaller screens, the quality approached HD. We tested with a wide variety of connections and CPU capabilities. The stability for both bitrates was nothing short of phenomenal.

Wouldn’t it be nice to simply open up a player, hit play, and watch your video as if you were playing a DVD? With Neokast you soon will! It actually took less time to play our test videos back than it would have taken to get a DVD out and play it.

Tom Evslin at Fractals of Change describes the current state of IPTV…

“As you know, there’s plenty of video on the Web. You can go to YouTube and see almost anything you want, most of it dreadful but some of it pretty good. You can also post your own videos on YouTube and you can vote on YouTube videos to try to help other people find the good ones. But this isn’t TV, at least as we’ve known it…

…But all of the above still isn’t TV as we know it and doesn’t replace it (yet):

• Most of the content we can get on network and cable TV is not available on the Internet.

• Most Internet content is low def, certainly not the high definition stuff that makes you run out and buy an expensive LCD screen.

• With the exception of baseball, you can’t get realtime major league sports or much else in real time (except webcams).”

Read it all.

I guess you can already assume that Neokast will be doing streaming over a bleeding-edge peer-to-peer network. It’s important to distinguish between latency, the time it takes for your video stream to be viewed by everyone else, and buffering, which is the time it takes for the video to appear after hitting the ‘play’ button.

You should care about two things:

#1 How long does it take for the video to appear on my screen?

#2 If I send out my own live stream, how much latency is involved? (this can be critical for your live sporting events)

We are shooting for 5 seconds max with #1.

As for #2, we will meet the typical latency that pay-for streaming solutions offer. We could do better, but then we’d have to settle in a number of ways. 2007 isn’t a year for settling.

By the way, no one allows live streaming with any sort of reasonable quality for free, nor do they have the technology in place to do so. Neokast does. We will have up to 1900×1200 resolution, which by the way, is only possible if you’re shooting with a camera that’s that good. Enough with trying to stream with your $20 webcams. Bust out your HD camcorder - we will handle the rest.

You could be your own news reporter at Bonnaroo and initiate live video feeds of the mud slides and mud parties out in the campground. It rains every year, and you know it’s going to happen, so why not share it with the whole world?

A professor at any college with limited technical know-how can easily hold live lectures that are viewable by people all over the world.

Can’t make it to your son’s high school basketball game? Public events can be viewed in real time by any number of people in a very simple, easy to use way. Can’t watch it in real time, fine with us - you can archive your streams.

Companies can stream meetings and conferences to all of their employees, clients, and business partners in a secure, user-authenticated environment.

We empower you to come up with more uses (we’ve come up with countless ones ourselves). After all, the ability for everyone to live stream is “one small step for all users, one giant leap for the web2.0 community.”

I guess that makes my 99 invitations less sought after.

“Google co-founder Sergey Brin said the company plans to introduce subscription options for heavy users later this year; the company’s photo-hosting service charges $25 per year for 6.25GB of storage and $500 for 250GB.

“We can’t afford to give away everything for free,” Brin told AP.”

Hmmmm.