By : Erik Gruenwedel | Posted: 06 Feb 2010
egruenwedel@questex.com

Hulu, the online repurposed TV content aggregator co-owned by NBC Universal, News Corp. and The Walt Disney Co., for the first time streamed more than 1 billion videos in December, according new comScore data.

The average Hulu viewer watched 22.9 videos during the month, representing another all-time high for the property.

Despite the milestones, Hulu, which is reportedly mulling a pay-per-view service in addition to the current ad-supported business model, represented just 3% of online monthly video streams, but second behind juggernaut, YouTube, with nearly 40% market penetration and 13.2 billion videos viewed.

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Jeff Kopang, Vice President of Marketing for ViewCast, provides a quick overview of the Niagara 2120 streaming media appliance.

If you are considering renting the Viewcast Niagara 2120 for your next webcast, web conference, live event, or pod cast, please watch this video for more information

The online video delivery experience

When delivering online videos there are generally two distinct ways to do it. HTTP Progressive Download or Streaming. You may assume that all videos are streaming, but you’ll be surprised to know that most aren’t.

So what are these two methods? How do they differ? What are the advantages and disadvantages of both? Why would I want to use one method over another?

Progressive Download
All web servers are capable of progressive download. This is merely the method of a video file being delivered via HTTP to a browser. This is similar to someone downloading a file from your website. In fact the video is delivered in the same manner that an image, a CSS, a JS, PDF, or any other file on your web site is.

The real difference is that media players can begin to show the video while it’s downloading. For example, a FLV file being delivered via HTTP Progressive download will begin to play in your Flash Player as soon as a little bit of data is received by the browser. The same is true for Windows Media files. Quick Time will wait until the entire file is downloaded before it plays, unless the QuickTime player on the PC/Mac is set for progressive play. So be careful when posting QuickTime videos.

It’s quite obvious when a video is being delivered via HTTP Progressive Download. You will typically see the little status bar grow as the video downloads. You won’t be able to move the scrubber button past the amount that has downloaded already. This makes it impossible to jump to the end of the video before that portion has downloaded. If you have a slow web server or limited bandwidth or the end user is on a slow Internet connection, then it’s possible for the enduser to notice buffering.

Buffering occurs when the download can’t stay ahead of video. The video will stop while it downloads more. If you pause the video and it allow to download a large portion, then you can watch the video uninterrupted. In either case, this is a poor enduser experience, this is when you would consider using a CDN.

There is a technology called Psuedo or Seek streaming. This method utilized TCP/IP Range Requests to allow the user to jump to any portion of the video and the player will make a range request of the file to download that portion. This method is usually only for FLV videos and requires special services, or servers and custom Flash players to function.

When a video is delivered via HTTP, it is actually downloaded to the end users computer. This is good and bad. It’s good because if the person watches the video again, it’s already cached on their computer. It’s bad because it makes it extremely easy for someone to steal your content.

Finally, if someone only watches the first minute of your video but doesn’t stop the download, the browser will download the whole file and you will pay for the delivery of the file even though the person didn’t watch the whole thing.

Streaming Video
Streaming video requires access to a streaming media server. Some servers are Flash Media Server, Wowza Media Server, Windows Media Server, Darwin Media Server (QuickTime), Real Media Server. These servers usually require licensing and may cost several thousands of dollars.

Some well known streaming protocols are RTMP, RTSP, and MMS.

When a video streams, it is being sent via UDP protocol to a player on the end users compter. The user will have the ability to fast forward or rewind the video. The video isn’t being downloaded to the end users computer so it is less likely that the content will be stolen. Also if the user only watches 5 minutes of a 30 minute video, then you only pay for the delivery of 5 mintues, not the whole video.

The biggest disadvantage of streaming over progressive download is if the user watches the same video over and over you will pay for the delivery of it each time.  Videos are also streamed at what ever bit rate they are encoded at.  Keep this in mind when creating HD quality video.  8Mbps video may sound and look great, but most homes can’t sustain an 8Mbps connection.  If you have really high bit rate video, consider delivering via HTTP.

Most web hosting providers or Content Delivery Networks (CDN) will have streaming media servers available to use. Historically, Flash video was more expensive to deliver than other forms. Recently prices have compressed and you will find that it costs about the same to deliver Flash or Windows Media files. In the past I would have said if your video is more than 10 minutes in length deliver it via Stream and less do progressive. Since prices have come down, I would consider streaming for any length video since streaming typically begins to play faster than progressive.

If you are looking at using a service such as a CDN or Cloud Computing and they say you can stream your videos, confirm with their tech support that they are utilizing a streaming server and not just offering bandwidth.

If you are delivering Flash videos, then you should be delivering via RTMP or RTMPE protocol for streaming and http for progressive. Windows Media uses either MMS or RTSP. Quicktime and Real Media use RTSP.

I hope you find this article of interest? This is a good guide to help you through deciding to use streaming delivery of videos or HTTP Progressive Download.

If you have any questions about this topic, please feel free to post them here and I will respond.  As always I ask that you support our sponsors.

Thanks,

Mike Colburn (DigitalMediaGuy)
Top Content Delivery Networks which support Streaming
* Limelight Networks
* EdgeCast Networks
* CDNetworks
* Level3
* Akamai

You may be asking yourself, what is a Flash Player?  or Why do I need one?  I have my Flash videos, won’t Internet Explorer or Firefox play them?  Have you ever tried to play a .FLV file on your computer?  You probably weren’t too successful in doing so.  .FLV is not a format that Windows Media Player or QuickTime player supports.  You can’t just link to a FLV file on your web page and expect the video to play like you would if it were a WMV or MOV file.  So how is it, that all these web sites have a Flash videos on them?

Whats unique about Flash is that you can create a customized player that embeds in a web site and plays the.  FLV (and some other formats) on the web site.  There are stand along FLV players you can get for your desktop, but most people don’t have those installed because FLV isn’t the type of video file that gets downloaded to a computer.  It’s main purpose in life is play through a web browser.

In the old days (about 5 years ago), the idea of Flash and Video together was silly.  There was no FLV format and you had to embed the video file into a SWF, making the SWF a huge file.  The video wouldn’t play until the whole SWF loaded.  A lot of that changed as the FLV format became widely used.  The FLV would play through a Flash Player and supported progressive downloads (meaning you can watch the video as it downloaded).  Then along came Flash Media server and streaming and now the fun really started!  To read more about the differences between streaming and downloading, click here.

What exactly is a Flash Player?

Using an application like Adobe Flash, you create a small application and compile it into a Shockwave File (SWF),  when the SWF is embedded on the web page, it can accept commands to play media files and FLV is one of those media files.  SWF players are usually very small and download quickly while the web page is loading.  What’s so great about creating SWF players is that they can look and feel how you want.  You can add buttons and functionality.  You can add features like chat, or interactivity, advertising, social media aspects, and easily track video usage.  Think about a little bowling game built into the player, as you are watching a bowling video you can play the game.  All those nifty little animated advertisements you see on web sites, those are mostly Flash SWF files.

How easy is it to make a Flash Player?

Not too easy if you don’t know what you’re doing.  But there are some simple, and cost effective ways to add Flash Video to your site.  One of my favorites is the JW Player by LongTail Video.  This player is OpenSource and free to download (for non-commercial uses).  It’s one of the most popular players out there now and rightfully so.  Besides being a fairly easy to use player, it supports all kinds of plug-ins and since it’s OpenSource you can create your plug-ins or skins.

Here are some of my favorite add-on’s to the JW Player:

• Easy Advertising (they bring quality ads right into your video and you get paid)
• Viral Marketing (add embed, link and comments to your videos)
• Related videos (add a list of related videos for the viewer to see)
• Built in Google Analytics (track the behaviour of each video file)
• HD Button (click a button to swtich between HD and SD versions of the the video)
• Accessibility (Add closed captions to your videos)
• Play Lists (Create play lists displaying multiple videos)
• Player Analytics (Track player movements like, start, stop, pause, etc)
• YouSearch (Search for YouTube videos and plays them inside the JW Player)
• Dozens of pre-made skins to change the look and feel of the player

You can see that the JW Player is very flexible.  They have a great support community and will even provide tech support via email for free!

If you’re looking to add Flash Videos to your web site, there is no real reason to make a custom Flash Player.  A good developer would charge you several hundred to thousands of dollars to develop a player.  Instead use a pre-made one.  Of course there will be times when creating your own custom and branded player is essential.  When that time comes, expect to spend some money and time developing it.

In the mean time, try out JW Player or Flow Player as an inexpensive and easy to use alternative.

If you have any questions about this topic, please post them here.

Thanks,

Mike Colburn (DigitalMediaGuy)

Do you want to increase your website sales, web-traffic, or start your own online TV talk show? Would you like to broadcast your newsletter articles or videos over the Internet to others? Has this seemed impractical because video loads too slow, takes to much web space or just seems to hard to understand. We’ll welcome to the NEW world of instant loading, user friendly web video.

You may have noticed that a large number of websites are now featuring videos, everything from music videos, to online training. News is a popular use for presenting website video. You’ve probably heard a lot about RSS (Really Simple Syndication), a format designed for sharing web content like news headlines. RSS will be covered in a future article.

Did you know?

That there are so many new advancements in online video and audio in the last year, almost anyone can have their own online radio or TV talk show, radio or television station without high fees, advanced technical knowledge, and no FCC (Federal Communications Commission) intervention or regulation. Just build a website, install your audio and/or video files, advertise, and you’re in business. You can even broadcast your audio and video files through RSS feeds (we’ll explain in a moment) to websites worldwide and Joint Venture (JV) with other website owners to include your video on their websites.

Why would you want to put video and audio on your website?

There are many reasons. We are now in the 21st Century and 2009 is said to be the year of online video. Video is a premier sales tool. You’ve heard that a picture is worth a thousand words. How many words is a video with audio worth? A LOT! More than ever, people today are in a hurry and easily distracted, and even sensitively attuned to watching television many hours a day. TV is losing some of its ground to web-surfing.

Give the people what they want, video. Entertain, inform and educate them the way they are already trained for. Now it’s easier than ever to do this. Here, we are focusing on adding video / audio to your website for various purposes such as, marketing, training, V-Blogging, video sharing and etc. New technology has made it easy to add fast loading (called Streaming) video content to your website.

Until recently, between slow dial-up Internet connections and older technology, adding video wasn’t practical for general website usage. But since over 60% of individuals online now have broadband access, and the new streaming technology, audio and video files can now be viewed online with little or no buffering. Buffering means to make the video viewable to your computer (the simple explanation). Therefore, video is now a feature that can be efficiently used online. There are still size and quality limitations to consider, but the industry is making progress in this arena almost daily.

The other problem hindering website video use was its complicated installation process. It’s been very difficult for the average individual to add video files to their websites. Windows Player simplified this process but still had limitations. It played a few formats, but not the streaming .swf (Flash) files and you had to know how to install their player on your website to play the video. You needed to know html webpage code or have a program like Microsoft’s FrontPage to install the player and video on a webpage.

Now there are a few new solutions that make it easy for the average person to install video on a website without needing too much computer or webpage knowledge. If a person knows how to cut and paste a simple code into a webpage, they can ad existing video files to their site. The tutorials even teach how to do this for the absolute beginner.

The latest software is an integration of several individual modules assembled as one user friendly software package that permits anyone to convert most of the existing video formats into fast loading, high quality, and streaming website videos. This software even enables you to customize your video player, video size, and quality. There is no player or software for your website visitor to download since the player is built into your webpage and loads almost instantly.

There are many software programs available that claim it’s easy to install video on your website. Most don’t work as promised. One good suite is Camtasia, but it is complex to use and cost several hundred dollars. A good user friendly, beginners’ level, feature-rich software should cost less than $100.

Streaming Video is the future of the Internet. In the United States of America, $2 billion was being spent on streaming media technologies, and is projected to grow to in excess of $12 billion per annul over the next few years.

Today the Internet is the fastest growing marketplace and offers global, opportunities to all, from international conglomerates to the individual person sat at the kitchen table. What though is the most effective form of communication on the information super highway? The Internet has become the place to communicate with one another and the means to search for and locate information. Video streaming brings a whole new dimension to this experience for everyone, be they business persons negotiating a deal, friends and family keeping in touch with their loved ones, or people sharing a common interest seeing one another for the first time.

For communication to be of use, it must be effective. People are expounding vast amounts of time, effort and money to communicate effectively on the Internet. Studies have shown that using video on the Internet gets people’s attention and increases the likelihood that the message will be remembered.
Humans remember:

• 10% of what they read,
• 30% of what they see,
• 50% of what they see and hear together,
• and 80% of what they see, hear and do.

(source: Dr. Mehrabians, Study of Communication.)

This should have a significant impact on how one uses the Internet as a means of communication. Email changed the Internet, but video is changing the World. Email has become the fastest growing form of communication. Every day billions of emails are sent and received and the number continues to grow, (even allowing for the known problems of Spam, viruses etc.) some analysts are predicting that the number of messages will ultimately grow to as many as 100 billion a day!

This may sound great, but if one remembers that to be of use communication has to be effective, clearly definite strategies will have to be developed to achieve this aim of successful communication. The three major problems that have to be considered are:

• “How do you make your message ’stand out from the crowd’?”
• “How do you ensure uniformity of message (so everyone sees and hears the same message?” and
• “How do you try to ensure your message is not confused and misunderstood?”

Some people have started to include pictures and images to help convey the meaning and to add impact, but that still doesn’t solve the problem! This is because we are used to ‘face to face’ communication, where the message is interpreted not only from the spoken word but also the non verbal communication. 55% of a messages meaning is derived from facial expression and 38% is derived from gestures, body language etc.

So what is the solution? People online need fully integrated video streaming facilities for their online communication and this technology is available now, ranging from Video Email, Video Instant Messaging and even live Webcasting and Streaming Web TV. Streaming Video is the online future, and now is the time to place ones self at the fore front of this next communication revolution.

If you wish to stream your own video technical experience is not a prerequisite; you just need to follow some simple instructions and you will quickly be up and running. Continue on with this report and I’ll teach you how simple it is to get started right away.

You see, in order to ‘paste’ a video file onto one of your webpages, the initial job is to “translate” your raw video file into flv format (known as flash video) – this is the net’s preferred display format for videos. This unique format enables you to ’squeeze’ your videos onto a reasonable file size (so you won’t end up with ‘heavyweight’ files…) while maintaining a top quality display level.

No matter when you want to stream your own video, this distinctive format keeps your digital movies in a special mode known as ’streaming’; this means that anytime your viewers click on play they can begin viewing any of your video(s), without delays of any kind, and even better, without having to download or install anything on their pc.

Okay, so now you’re familiar with the system, and you’re probably asking yourself how to get up and running, the answer is quite simple – you’ve got to find a simple (yet professional) software solution to do that for you. This utility will have to be able to convert your initial file(s) to flv combined with an embedded movie player, so all you need to do is send the new video to your webserver, and insert a small code line onto your webpage, wherever you would like the video to be displayed, and it’s ready to go!

Now you understand that in order to stream your own video no special training is required, you need to look for a proper solution that will have you up and running with a few clicks of your mouse, it needs the capability to compress your movies to at least 10% of the original file(s), and provide you with a professional embedded flv player.

You may be asking yourself, what is a Flash Player?  or Why do I need one?  I have my Flash videos, won’t Internet Explorer or Firefox play them?  Have you ever tried to play a .FLV file on your computer?  You probably weren’t too successful in doing so.  .FLV is not a format that Windows Media Player or QuickTime player supports.  You can’t just link to a FLV file on your web page and expect the video to play like you would if it were a WMV or MOV file.  So how is it, that all these web sites have a Flash videos on them?

Whats unique about Flash is that you can create a customized player that embeds in a web site and plays the .FLV (and some other formats) on the web site.  There are stand along FLV players you can get for your desktop, but most people don’t have those installed because FLV isn’t the type of video file that gets downloaded to a computer.  It’s main purpose in life is play through a web browser.

In the old days (about 5 years ago), the idea of Flash and Video together was silly.  There was no FLV format and you had to embed the video file into a SWF, making the SWF a huge file.  The video wouldn’t play until the whole SWF loaded.  A lot of that changed as the FLV format became widely used.  The FLV would play through a Flash Player and supported progressive downloads (meaning you can watch the video as it downloaded).  Then along came Flash Media server and streaming and now the fun really started!  To read more about the differences between streaming and downloading, click here.

What exactly is a Flash Player?

Using an application like Adobe Flash, you create a small application and compile it into a Shockwave File (SWF),  when the SWF is embedded on the web page, it can accept commands to play media files and FLV is one of those media files.  SWF players are usually very small and download quickly while the web page is loading.  What’s so great about creating SWF players is that they can look and feel how you want.  You can add buttons and functionality.  You can add features like chat, or interactivity, advertising, social media aspects, and easily track video usage.  Think about a little bowling game built into the player, as you are watching a bowling video you can play the game.  All those nifty little animated advertisements you see on web sites, those are mostly Flash SWF files.

How easy is it to make a Flash Player?

Not too easy if you don’t know what you’re doing.  But there are some simple, and cost effective ways to add Flash Video to your site.  One of my favorites is the JW Player by LongTail Video.  This player is OpenSource and free to download (for non-commercial uses).  It’s one of the most popular players out there now and rightfully so.  Besides being a fairly easy to use player, it supports all kinds of plug-ins and since it’s OpenSource you can create your plug-ins or skins.

Here are some of my favorite add-on’s to the JW Player:

• Easy Advertising (they bring quality ads right into your video and you get paid)
• Viral Marketing (add embed, link and comments to your videos)
• Related videos (add a list of related videos for the viewer to see)
• Built in Google Analytics (track the behaviour of each video file)
• HD Button (click a button to swtich between HD and SD versions of the the video)
• Accessibility (Add closed captions to your videos)
• Play Lists (Create play lists displaying multiple videos)
• Player Analytics (Track player movements like, start, stop, pause, etc)
• YouSearch (Search for YouTube videos and plays them inside the JW Player)
• Dozens of pre-made skins to change the look and feel of the player

You can see that the JW Player is very flexible.  They have a great support community and will even provide tech support via email for free!

If you’re looking to add Flash Videos to your web site, there is no real reason to make a custom Flash Player.  A good developer would charge you several hundred to thousands of dollars to develop a player.  Instead use a pre-made one.  Of course there will be times when creating your own custom and branded player is essential.  When that time comes, expect to spend some money and time developing it.