Want to have lunch with Imogen Heap today? Elemental Technologies can help. In streaming 1080 HD.

Sometimes, seeing is believing. And that’s never more true that with Portland-based Elemental Technologies. With their technical wizardry, more folks are encoding, transcoding, and streaming faster and more efficiently than ever before. But you really have to see it to believe it.

And today, you get the chance to do that as Elemental’s technology helps power Imogen Heap’s concert from Royal Albert Hall at 7 PM GMT—that’s the lunch hour for you and me—all in streaming 1080 HD.

So first, what’s Elemental doing?

The live web broadcast is made possible by back-hauling the HD feed to iStreamPlanet’s Las Vegas, NV US Broadcast Operations Center from the Royal Albert Hall in London. It will then be encoded in IIS Smooth Streaming, Flash as well as Apple HTTP segmented for the iPhone and iPad. The IIS Smooth Streaming feed, which allows viewers with the proper bandwidth to view it in full 1080 HD, will be encoded using Elemental Live, which uses the power of graphics processing units (GPUs) to encode the 1080 streams in real time.

Is that a big deal? Yes. It is.

“What makes this event interesting is that a live HD webcast at 1080 is actually delivering Blu-ray quality audio and video through a globally connected network,” said Christopher Courtney, founder of Rebild Productions. “When I first started live webcasting in 1994 it was a very humble beginning as far as audio and video quality, but five years later 700 kilobit streams were common. Now in 2010 we are proving through this 1080 HD live webcast that the Internet, thanks to partners iStreamPlanet, Elemental Technologies and Akamai, is rapidly becoming a global video network with no difference in quality compared with traditional television.”

Oh. So what will you be watching? You may know Grammy winner Imogen Heap from her work with Frou Frou, but it’s more likely you’ll recognize her soundtrack works like the song she contributed to the Shrek 2 soundtrack, a remake of Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding out for a Hero.”

Okay. I’ll stop the fanboi pandering now.

This time around, Imogen will be featuring an opening act of her Love the Earth film a nature film created from clips that have been submitted by Heap’s fans around the world. After opening her own concert, Imogen will then move over to being the main act with her own band.

For more on the concert, visit Resounde. For more on the technology and the Portland connection, visit Elemental Technologies.

Published by Rick Turoczy

More than mildly obsessed with the Portland startup community. Founder and editor at Silicon Florist. Cofounder and general manager at PIE. Follow me on Twitter: @turoczy View all posts by Rick Turoczy