Streaming video is the answer?
The New York Times tells us that streaming is the answer to Online Video escaping niche audiences. I'm not so sure.
Streaming is good if you want to monitor viewing, and simple to deliver. But on today's average broadband connection the experience is bad. That's not going to change soon, becuase the speed of broadband connections fluctuates significantly. There's always likely to be a glitch if you push the connection to the limits to get a good picture quality.
I think that with good Metadata, the download-based TV experience will be better.
Tagged: Media
Posted at 23:07 BST, 6th August 2007.
Last changed at 09:10 BST, 7th August 2007.
2 Comments
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Not so simple
From a server's point of view, streaming is much less simple to deliver. It's simpler for the user, but it has all the difficulties of getting a large number of bits to the user, plus a performance requirement of getting them there in time.
In practice, once content people are using either streaming or direct distribution from a central source they tend to make the quality suck, as that makes it both easier and cheaper to get it done.
I think you are dead right about quality, and we can have that high quality, high def experience right now, using open protocols; it's just harder than it ought to be. We are fast heading towards online tv being chiefly a filtering problem – what should I fetch and watch – rather than a technical hassle of how to wrangle the bits effectively. It'll be a challenge to make that a really pleasant experience, so that people can turn to their random device (set-top box, laptop, phone, &c) on and have plenty of good content waiting for them.
Agreed.
And sure, streaming is more difficult at the server end. But that's the least of your worries if you consider deploying software like BBC iPlayer.
There is a tiny glimpse at the pain of making DRM windows software work smoothly here