Josh Wieder

For over a year I assisted the Palm Beach Post with an in-depth investigation on the State of Florida's involvement with sparking the current heroin epidemic. That investigation has just been published . Among other things, I assisted the Post by creating a custom player to support a carousel-style multimedia presentation with full-screen video encoded using Azure Media Services and distributed through Verizon CDN. It just occurred to me while writing this that my very first work with streaming was Windows Media Services 4.1 on IIS 5.0 (I missed the NetShow party ). It sucked. AMS isn't too bad. For over a century, the United States' narrative surrounding its continuing war on its own drug-addicted citizens has been a jingoistic heap of catch-phrases and rationalizations that have resulted in  the US incarcerating a larger share of our citizens in both absolute and per capita terms than any other nation in the world . News organizations (particularly - but not solely...

NPR's Sami Yenigun has a story discussing the importance of high performance video streaming making the rounds on their site and radio properties today. The time when companies could get away with a poor web presence is over. Here is my favorite quote: "What we found was that people are pretty patient for up to two seconds," Sitaraman says. "If you start out with, say, 100 users — if the video hasn't started in five seconds, about one-quarter of those viewers are gone, and if the video doesn't start in 10 seconds, almost half of those viewers are gone."