Raising the video quality bar: Vusion's WARP video player delivers

Online video is on fire these days. I'll once again cite the recent numbers out from  Ipsos MediaCT, showing that 19% of all video watched anywhere, including traditional TV and DVD is now done online. With YouTube commanding about a 70% market share of all online video viewing, it means we've pretty much just accepted the lower picture quality for web video, at least for now. YouTube of course now offers higher-quality streams of videos where the publisher's have uploaded the larger versions. Still, it's not TV quality. 

But true HD quality video is coming. We've seen a leap forward from Hulu with their HD content, along with blip.tv and Veoh setting a higher standard in terms of picture quality. What's the next step?  Vusion (formerly Jittr) provides what they call "instant-on, full-screen, high quality streaming video." The Milpitas, CA-based company recently snagged the prestigious “Judges Choice” award in the video section of Under the Radar 2008.

Right now, they just have a handful of  demo videos on their site to show off their next-gen WARP player. The player requires the WARP plug-in and is well worth the minute or two it takes to ge it setup. Since they don't yet allow embedding of their demos , I've posted a screen shot from Kanye West's "Stronger" video. Click on the image to watch it on their site. I recommend the full-screen version which is really what the WARP player is all about. It  enables a TV-like full screen viewing experience while eliminating buffering and pausing so common with other streaming media players. It's basically a bit of hybrid between pure streaming video and downloaded video since it temporarily stores video chunks on your hard drive to enhance the streaming performance, without fully downloading the video to your machine.

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Comments

[Arjun]

I'm not going to lie... the video was excellent. The quality was unbelievable, and my mediocre home connection didn't make the video stutter once.

But I'm just not sure how well a downloadable plug-in will be. They've got to be careful about turning out to be like RealPlayer, whose downloadable plug-in was a huge pain. But this definitely has potential.

[Drew Baldwin]

I saw this player demo at Digital Hollywood last fall http://www.vividas.com/ it's awesome. The Vividas player does not need either software or video player downloads to be installed by consumers, and it plays HD video if it detects enough bandwidth.