Zaheer Abbas Merali

I have had a wonderful 4 1/2 years at Flumotion where I am proud to have been part of a huge success that I didn’t think was possible at the time I started. We have streamed live the Olympics, the FIFA World Cup, Cristiano Ronaldo’s inauguration at Real Madrid, Barack Obama’s inauguration as President of the USA, the UK election’s first live debates, the launch by Shakira of the new Seat Leon and much much more that I have forgotten over the years. We are the only streaming solution I know of that streams Ogg/Theora/Vorbis, Flash (with H264/VP6 video and MP3/AAC audio), Windows Media, WebM, iPhone/iPad fragmented streaming and can do all that from DVB (satellite or terrestrial), Firewire, Webcam, Analogue TV card, Windows Media Encoder, Flash Media Encoder and others I have forgotten about probably.

It has impressed me heavily about how, without any badgering from us devs, that our marketing team have really been pushing our WebM streaming. When our sales and marketing drive started a few years ago, there was reluctance as perceived from our (development) end to push the free formats. This year, with the hard work put in at all sorts of hours to make live streaming of WebM a reality, the marketing has been plenty to mark our pioneering work. This culminated with last week’s streaming of Guadec in WebM which we developers had no idea about until just days before it started.

As some of you know, I have been working the last 3 years in London while the office and everyone else at the company is in Barcelona. This kind of isolation amongst a few other factors were involved in my decision to leave. So last week instead of being at Guadec, I was in Barcelona doing a little knowledge transfer (and getting my hands dirty with some bug hunting and fine-tuning of the Guadec streams). Last Friday, the 30th July 2010 was my last day working at Flumotion.

This week, I have a short break where I am cleaning and doing some admin that I needed to do and just haven’t got around to. Next week, I start my new role at Tandberg/Cisco. It looks exciting and I am looking forward to starting a new chapter in my worklife there.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010 at 9:31 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.