My feeling is that the market is big enough in the US that a minor setback that the standard isn't "robust" enough isn't going to hold back some brilliant engineer to get around a poor signal.
I mean, we still deal with 7-bit transmissions and that hasn't slowed anyone down. With 265 million people with money burning a hole in their pocket, standards won't matter that much. The tech will come to the US, it'll just take a while.
I'll second what was already said in the article. The game industry isn't for the weak or timid. I just recently exited from the game arena myself for some of the same reasons. I didn't leave the company because of "The Man" was putting us down (The Man was actually good to us, having sold over 2 million copies of our game.) but rather over the lifestyle that I found myself having.
The game industry thrives and breathes on young, single workers right out of school or art institutes and uses them as indentured servants more or less. Although I was young, I was married and had a brand new baby. I couldn't put in the 14 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week that the job requires. And I wasn't the only married guy at the company with his wife calling up in tears because she hadn't seen her husband in two weeks. I'm almost convinced that if you want to truly enjoy the industry, you have to accept the fact that you won't have much of a social life outside of games.
Was it fun? Gosh, yes. It's almost like a drug working in the game industry. You get to hang out with people with exactly the same interests, work with some of the hottest technology and play games when you're not under a deadline... but for me it wasn't worth missing out on family and having a *LIFE*.
Working in the game industry isn't for everyone. If you want to work in the field, be prepared for what awaits you. It's very much like a manic depresive. There are some real highs and terrible lows. You don't get paid very well and job stability is iffy at times. But there is that moment when you go to the software store and see someone pick up your game and head to the cash register.
For those guys over thirty who can stick it out being married and putting up with all the stress working on games... my hat's off to you.
I'm surprised no one else has mentioned going toward a Mac platform for what you want to do. You mention that you want to stream video, but don't specify the format that you want to do it in.
.ASF - Uh, yeah right... .RM - Real may be the standard but it is a server hog and the cost for the server software... Yikes! .AVI - We're talking streaming here...
For streaming seriously look at the Quicktime format. The server software is only $500 or so and runs like a dream. Everyone can use it and there are plenty of encoding solutions out there to make QT files to stream out.
Our current solution where I work for doing what you propose, is filming everything in DV, encode it in a render farm consisting of 4 G3 computers with BlueICE cards, all fiber channeled to 360GB of drive space.
If you're looking for quality streaming video at a great price, seriously look into getting a couple of G3s. You don't need to spend thousands of dollars of multi-processor NT/Linux solutions when a non-expensive non-MS platform already exists doing exactly what you need.
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My feeling is that the market is big enough in the US that a minor setback that the standard isn't "robust" enough isn't going to hold back some brilliant engineer to get around a poor signal.
I mean, we still deal with 7-bit transmissions and that hasn't slowed anyone down. With 265 million people with money burning a hole in their pocket, standards won't matter that much. The tech will come to the US, it'll just take a while.
I'll second what was already said in the article. The game industry isn't for the weak or timid. I just recently exited from the game arena myself for some of the same reasons. I didn't leave the company because of "The Man" was putting us down (The Man was actually good to us, having sold over 2 million copies of our game.) but rather over the lifestyle that I found myself having.
The game industry thrives and breathes on young, single workers right out of school or art institutes and uses them as indentured servants more or less. Although I was young, I was married and had a brand new baby. I couldn't put in the 14 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week that the job requires. And I wasn't the only married guy at the company with his wife calling up in tears because she hadn't seen her husband in two weeks. I'm almost convinced that if you want to truly enjoy the industry, you have to accept the fact that you won't have much of a social life outside of games.
Was it fun? Gosh, yes. It's almost like a drug working in the game industry. You get to hang out with people with exactly the same interests, work with some of the hottest technology and play games when you're not under a deadline... but for me it wasn't worth missing out on family and having a *LIFE*.
Working in the game industry isn't for everyone. If you want to work in the field, be prepared for what awaits you. It's very much like a manic depresive. There are some real highs and terrible lows. You don't get paid very well and job stability is iffy at times. But there is that moment when you go to the software store and see someone pick up your game and head to the cash register.
For those guys over thirty who can stick it out being married and putting up with all the stress working on games... my hat's off to you.
I'm surprised no one else has mentioned going toward a Mac platform for what you want to do. You mention that you want to stream video, but don't specify the format that you want to do it in.
.ASF - Uh, yeah right...
.RM - Real may be the standard but it is a server hog and the cost for the server software... Yikes!
.AVI - We're talking streaming here...
For streaming seriously look at the Quicktime format. The server software is only $500 or so and runs like a dream. Everyone can use it and there are plenty of encoding solutions out there to make QT files to stream out.
Our current solution where I work for doing what you propose, is filming everything in DV, encode it in a render farm consisting of 4 G3 computers with BlueICE cards, all fiber channeled to 360GB of drive space.
If you're looking for quality streaming video at a great price, seriously look into getting a couple of G3s. You don't need to spend thousands of dollars of multi-processor NT/Linux solutions when a non-expensive non-MS platform already exists doing exactly what you need.