It is always good to kick off a conference - particularly a tech startup beauty show like Demo - with a splash. That is just what DemoFall’s longtime organiser, Chris Shipley, did with Digital Fountain, the kick off demonstrator at today’s event in San Diego.

Digital Fountain, a privately funded Fremont-based digital video infrastructure startup, showed off itsDF Splash technology which cleans up "lossy" IP-delivered video guaranteeing near broadcast quality video even when a sizable number of packets are dropped.

Digital Fountain demonstrated the technology’s rather impressive performance by deliberately dropping one tenth of one percent of the packets in a video stream, then half of one per cent and finally cranked the packets lost up to 20 per cent. Even with one fifth of the packets dropped, the video looked smooth and the accompanying audio was clean - pretty impressive.

In theory the technology could remove the need for Akamai-style edge video servers enabling companies to host video content wherever it is cheapest and makes most sense. Digital Fountain is actually using Amazon Web Services on a pay-as-you go basis so the technology could be rather disruptive for established players like Akamai and Limelight Networks that have invested fortunes in hardware-heavy content delivery networks.

September 25th, 2007 in Internet | Permalink