The area where Vivo really shines is in its showcase development tool, VideoNow. The $149 VideoNow 3.0 has been specifically designed for developers wanting to add basic or advanced on-demand video and/or audio feeds to their Web sites. The client's primary selling point is that it produces multimedia content optimized for streaming over the bandwidth of most modems.
VideoNow lets you take either an AVI or a QuickTime file and convert it to streamed video content (with compression ratios of up to 200:1) that can be served from any type of Web server. Or you can go the audio-only route by converting WAV or AIFF files into streamed audio content.
In either case, the best aspect of all three production tools is that they are server independent, meaning that VivoActive content can be hosted on and streamed from standard HTTP (web) servers as well as specialized media servers like Microsoft NetShow, Netscape Live Media, and RealNetworks Real Media.
