LCCS Alternatives

[Adobe_ejs]

Hi all,

You may have seen an email message earlier today from me describing our plans to shutdown the LCCS service on December 31st.    I would like to use this thread for the community to discuss alternatives.   There isn't a one-size fits all solution so I think it's useful to talk about a couple of different options.  You may discover others on your own so please post them here.  To get the discussion started, here's some things I've looked at.

• Open Source.  We have looked at this as an option and it's simply not viable for a number of reasons.   There are dependancies on third party and Adobe code that are extremely difficult to separate out.   Some of this code runs other services at Adobe that will continue to operate.
• Flash Media Server.  LCCS is an application built on top of FMS.   I've spoken with some customers that are planning to build the LCCS features they need on top of an FMS server.   Having spoken with the FMS product manager, I can say that FMS continues to have a roadmap and will be getting investment.   We will continue to sell it into the future.   I realize this option may not be viable for some because of the associated expense around licensing and hosting your own FMS server - which brings us to FMS hosting
• FMS hosting services:  http://www.influxis.com/ does FMS hosting.  There may be others that provide this service as well.   Please post others if you know of any. 

Also if you need further information from Adobe, I''ll do my best to dig it up.

Thanks,

Jeff

[Former Community Member]

Adam,  It actually next our our list of feature testing so we can make sure it is correctly working as documented.

[adam_k]

that's great news, thanks james.

how soon can i submit a support ticket for this feature? i realize you must have an overwhelming amount of testing to do right now, but since you're about to test recording, perhaps i can put this on your radar (informally).

it seems that the audio and video streams are recorded separately and played back individually. during the playback of a recording the video stream starts playback as soon as the stream is buffered, and so does the audio stream.

however, they often reach a ready buffer state at different times. this has the effect of de-synching the audio and video playback. hopefully you can create a mechanism that ensures an audio/video stream pair commence playback at the same time to ensure a/v sync.

thanks!

adam

[Former Community Member]

Adam,

I add it to our list to investigate. Currently we focused on getting LCCS working as it has done previously before we address any protential improvements. Thanks for the heads up..

James

[adam_k]

thanks james, i understand that your priority will first be to complete the transition of LCCS to Influxis, but thanks for taking my issue into early consideration.

cheers

adam

[Former Community Member]

We are simply wanting ICS to be a success so can improve the service so all suggestions and possible improvements are very much welcome. So please let us know if there is something can be improved so that we can investigate. PS: Adam thanks for the feedback and suggestions.

James

[Former Community Member]

Hi Adam,

Been speaking to the team here and we have added it to our improvement list. It currently right near the top. This is something we likely look at finding if there is a solution to address this. We likely look at it once we have launched so likely be late december or early january at the earliest realisticly. But if you can provide me with a sample application which hightlight's this issue, so we can debug the issue this would help speed things up. If you can help then please drop me an email at james.jackson@influxis.com that would be great.

James

[Former Community Member]

Hi James and Adam,

Here's the best recorder/playback I've found so far, I put it on my video conferencing app:

http://grannyunits4u.com/connector/btntest.html

Hit Proceed to go past the splash page.

The recording app. is a little too complicated to be completely ready for prime time, but it works great and if you're planning to develope a recording app. I thought you would appreciate knowing about this one.

Glad Influxis is chosen to move ahead with LCCS, when will we find out about the cost structure?

Gary

[Former Community Member]

Hi Gary,

Well once I have details of the cost structure I post a new disscussion about them. I see what I can do to get hold of them as soon as possible.

James

[BARRYC16]

Hi James,

I talked to Wes a few weeks ago about the possibility of Influxis having a pricing option that was similar to LCCS pricing... based more on usage rather than max number of connections.

Some consumer applications like mine, have very low predicatability and a high degree of variance around max simultaneous connections. Are you guys considering including a pricing option that would help us out? I would also be interested to hear if there are other products built on LCCS that have the same concern. I would think that most consumer facing/social products would be in the same boat as we are.

Thanks,

Barry

[Former Community Member]

Hi Barry,

I spoken to the team and we are considering additional and more flexible pricing options. Which we may be providing in the new year. We will post updates on the forums and ICS website as the pricing evolves.

James

[JoshRWeinstein]

Hi James,

First off -- thanks so much for taking the lead on the LCCS transition. Second, I'd like to echo Barry's suggestion on the pricing side so I'm glad to hear that your team is looking into a more flexible structure!

Best,

Josh

[Former Community Member]

Hi Josh,

The whole of Influxis is excited about being able to continue the LCCS service no more than myself, wesley, richard and jerry and as as soon as I have any news on alternative pricing I will let you know. I can't promise anything at the moment, but we are having regular active discussions concerning it.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to get in contact.

Cheers,

James

[asofiacaib]

It would be amazing if you could be able to continue developers  free $15 option, we'll be very gratefull in Venezuela. I'm developing an app for my university and they're very interested to purchase but I need to finish my project.

[sebpatu2000]

Hi i'd also like to point out that our application can also have high pick of concurrent connections (several hundreds), and if the pricing changes to a high price only because of number of concurrent connections, it will totally break our business model based on LCCS pricings which did not took it in account like this.

And when you have several users connected only to watch a video live streamed threw LCCS, you will be charged twice for every new visitor: once for the new connection, and a second time for the bandwidth consumed.

I don't mind to pay 25 $ at start instead of the free 15 $ but the way pricing are getting higher is crucial to not kill business models. It seems to be ok for bandwidth, but the concurrent connections would be a killer thing for us.

Thanks in advance, to take this type of usecase in account.

And thanks for taking great LCCS back in life.

[Gustavo_Scanfer]

We are using the Screen sharing from LCCS but as soon as we discovered that Adobe will end it, we started developing our own. So maybe in a near future we will be able to provide it to anyone who needs.

The good news is that, right now, we already provide our real-time technology to developers and corporations. We don't have pre-built components as LCCS does, but we do offer highly scalable real-time technology so you can build your own synchronized components or anything you want. It is easy to provision rooms / groups where members can send and receive real-time messages and synchronize changes and events.

This technology can also be used to push notifications, realtime data, live dashboards, etc...

We also offer live audio/video out-of-the-box so you can integrate a webconference to your app pretty quickly. It is low-latency and high quality audio and video.

You can see our B2C product that uses our technology at http://www.pligus.com (please notice that it this product is running on a Brazilian server, videoconference quality will be much higher if we were to deploy near your customers).

Those who are interested can contact me at contact@pligus.com I think we are an excelent alternative!

[Former Community Member]

When you say you are creating your own screen sharing, I am wondering if this would involve some kind of 3rd party plug in, are you simply capturing the Flash Player's display and sending it across the wire (I have found this to be quite slow) or have you managed to leverage the "builtin" adobe plugin that LCCS activates?  I ask because for what I am doing, the first solution is not an option as most of my users do not have rights to install new software (while the current LCCS solution worked fine).  Thanks in advance!

P.S.  Does anyone know if Adobe is monitoring this thread?  I have not seen them respond to much here and there are a lot of paying customers who are just looking for some kind of guidance.

Message was edited by: philswe

[Gustavo_Scanfer]

Hi philswe,

We are in a very early-stage of our screen sharing development. But I can say that, as of now, the users will have to install a plug in. You think that your users would have the rights to run a Java Applet instead?

I didn't know it was possible to capture the Flash Player's display. How do you do that, it captures the entire desktop? Is the image quality good? You think that is possible to make it fast enough?

And I guess it's not possible or legal to leverage the builtin adobe plugin, so we didn't even try this path.

Adobe has heard it before but here it goes again: it would be great if the user's screen was available as a webcam is, so we could get and broadcast it ourselves.

Thanks!

[Former Community Member]

Not too sure about the Java Applet but these would be some very locked down corporate type PCs. 

You can capture an image of the stage but not the desktop so that is pretty limited.  I messed around with it awhile back and the problem was one of compression.  To do effective screen streaming you need a codec that simply sends compressed differences in the images and key frames (as the webcam does) and I never got past sending 4 frames a second.  Also, there was no remote control.  In all, unusable.

I was hoping that someone from Adobe would say, "Since we are cutting all you customers off, here is a way to leverage our built in technology".  Since they are leaving us out in the cold, I don't see what harm that could do.

[OpenTok]

Hi Jeff,

The OpenTok platform may be able to help your customers as they transition out of LCCS. 

TokBox, the company behind OpenTok, has been delivering live face-to-face video through the web since 2007.  We have helped American Idol, Coke and over 30,000 startups and websites bring the emotion of live video communication to their site or app. 

Our cloud-based OpenTok API makes it easy for developers to add face-to-face video to their applications without having to worry about infrastructure and scale.  We offer JavaScript and ActionScript libraries as well as a new iOS SDK.  With OpenTok, developers can control size, interaction and layout to support a range of use-cases: 1-to-1 video conversations, broadcasts and multi-party video calls.

http://www.tokbox.com/opentok/api/features

http://www.tokbox.com/learnmore

[LCCS_lives]

Hi Opentok,

great to find you here.

Your tool is built upon wowza I think?

It's great, but I think you really do not need

     having your logo present (see terms of use). Please remove it.

     Why did you stop AIR for mobile ability?

If you would provide text chat, whiteboard, screen sharing and real event handling opentok would be an alternative.

Also providing flex components or just shared managers, shared model components would be great for the beginning.

As you see, you are far away from LCCS or our point of view, but I trust in you going this way :-)

Go on!

Regards,

George

[OpenTok]

Hi LCSS Lives,

Yes, we're built on Wowza and do have an extensive roadmap planned incuding text chat and event handling.  Our focus, however, is on video communication and we have a powerful set of ActionScript and JavaScript libraries but certainly don't target the full range of needs serviced by LCCS. 

With AIR for mobile we just weren't getting the performance we needed from this platform, didn't see this as a prioritiy for Adobe, and are now focused on better solutions for mobile. 

Have you noticed our new iOS SDK - launched just last week! 

On the logo treatment, are you referring to the very small icon that appears in the rollover state?