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Is Streaming Media Right For You? (Part One Of Two)
Posted On 17 Apr 2003
Is audio and video on demand the next logical progression in the development of Web entertainment? Many prominent media companies seem to think so. My cable company does. For the mere price of $9.99 additional per month I can experience the wonders of digital cable.Introduction
Is audio and video on demand the next logical progression in the development of Web entertainment? Many prominent media companies seem to think so. My cable company does. For the mere price of $9.99 additional per month I can experience the wonders of digital cable. I can now select from a catalog of over four hundred movies, view them whenever I want, and use VCR-like controls to pause, rewind, and fast forward as I see fit. This is the innovation in entertainment technology we have long been promised and it might redefine the rules of the game.
You might ask what digital cable TV has to do with the Web. Well as it happens, interactive digital TV is delivered over newfangled cable networks that work in ways unlike the Internet itself. Technical comparisons aside, the user experience is also pretty much the same. I watch when I want, what I want, and how I want. That’s exactly the point of streaming media on the Internet. Just point your web browser at the desired content, click, and it plays. No fuss, no waiting and instant gratification. Who wants to wait for downloads anymore? I’ve got broadband and I don’t want to wait. What about you? What about your customers?
What is Streaming Media
What exactly is streaming media, you ask? It’s a good question considering that there is significant confusion about correct use of the term floating about, and for good reason. Most simply, streaming media is the real time delivery (with immediate consumption by the end user) of audio or video data. The most popular file formats you might recognize are MP3 or WMA for audio, and MPG (MPEG) or RM (RealMedia) for video. All you Kazaa and Bearshare users should be intimately familiar with these types of files.
To clarify what the phrase “real time” means, consider this: Television and radio deliver to you video and audio in real time. You consume the programming at the time it arrives at your TV or radio (forget about VCRs and such for the moment). The programming may be live or prerecorded, but either way you receive it only moments after it leaves the TV or radio studio. That’s real time.
Sometimes it’s easier to understand what streaming media is by discussing what it isn’t. Streaming media is not:
1. Downloading a file,
2. Saving it to your local disk, and
3. Playing it back at a later date.
Get it? If the content starts to play right away, it’s streaming media. If it doesn’t play right away you’re just downloading a media file. It seems pretty simple right?
Well here’s the gray area. There is a middle ground called “buffered play back”. Essentially you are downloading a file as usual and saving it to your local disk, yet at the same time that happens you can also view or listen to the file. If you have a fast Net connection buffered playback can provide a very similar experience to streaming media. One click and viola! Instant gratification.
The vast majority of what people think is streaming media on the Internet today is really buffered playback. The media files are actually served up by a plain old Web server. Web servers are great for distributing files, but they don’t have any way to receive quality of service feedback. You ask the Web server for a file and it pushes it out to you without looking back. File coming too fast? Too bad. Too slow? Too bad. Out of sync? Not my problem. Web servers are just not designed to deliver real time audio and video. As a result users experience jerky video playback, dropouts in audio, the hated “buffering” message, and a generally dissatisfying experience. This particularly affects those on slower connections (56K, ISDN, slow DSL).
(In Part Two of this article, we will discuss in depth the various aspects of streaming media.)
Michael Marinello is the owner of Premier Adult Hosting and a 7-year veteran Internet technology consultant. Through Premier Adult Hosting, Marinello and his team offer the adult industry access to advanced hosting, consulting, and technical services not otherwise readily accessible to this audience. Their expertise helps clients get an edge on the competition and solve business problems, build stable platforms, find new solutions, and ultimately improve gross revenue and profit. Premier Adult Hosting offers shared and dedicated hosting, security, independent consultation, and collocation services.
Marinello’s non-adult consulting practice has serviced clients on the Fortune 500 and Wall Street. Marinello applies his extensive background in business, network security architecture, and Web-based systems to clients of Premier Adult Hosting with the same exceptional results. He can be reached at mike@premieradulthosting.net or via ICQ # 172303844. The Premier Adult Hosting website is located at http://www.premieradulthosting.net.
