To stream or not to stream?
I am really behind my blog posts this week and need to post my slides and code from both the recent Tech Talk we had at Microsoft and the Mini Mix event currently underway. Before I do that however I want to say a few words about streaming video and integrating that into your blog or web site.
Streaming is a confusing topic to most and there is a lot of mixed messages out there about how to go about it. The first thing to understand is the there two basic ways to "Stream Video" over the Internet. The most common way is to progressively download the file from a web server. This is basically a download that is cached behind the scenes by the browser. These are some issues you should keep in mind when using this approach:
- All the content is cached client side and this may create issues for those with digital rights management (DRM) concerns
- In most cases the content is downloaded at the fastest possible speed and will likely be completely downloaded well before the end of the video is viewed. If the video is not completely viewed than there will likely be wasted bandwidth.
- Users cannot arbitrarily navigate to the end and must wait until the video is completely viewed.
The alternative approach is to "Stream" the video from a media server. In true streaming, nothing is cached client side but there are things to consider here as well:
- Only the content that is watched is streamed. This better than the former option but only if the video is not viewed more than once within a given session.
- You need more than a basic web server to support .
- Does not work very well in cases of intermittent connectivity as nothing is cached to buffer the process.
In my case I wanted to be able to stream video to support my blog entries and my web site. The challenge I had with positing files on the web site was that I had no way to throttle the bandwidth and track the usage of the material. I also wanted to give my viewers the ability to return to a webcast at a particular point rather than having to download the entire video repeatedly. I therefore decided to look into obtaining some streaming services.
It may surprise readers to find out that even though I work for Microsoft, the support to post public content on corporate assets is somewhat constrained and I was forced to look outside for options. Silverlight streaming, YouTube, Soapbox and others are all basically progressive download. After a couple of false starts with hosters who claimed to have "Streaming" capability but were really progressively downloading, I have settled with StreamHoster. Time will tell if this works out or not. I would appreciate any comments about alternatives as well.
John
