The Basics of Video Streaming - Are You Streaming or What? Are you streaming, are you web casting, are you using the Internet to send and receive and view video? If so, you are on the edge of the coolest of the cool. Once limited to early adapters and black wearing video artists, web based and streaming video is now finding acceptance with broadcasters, with Internet cruisers as well as in the corporate world. Why? Because it is finally working. Web and streaming video now can be much more than just a tiny little window with grainy images that refresh once or twice a second. Of course, if you only got a 24.4kps AOL connection, that is what video probably still looks like to you. However, depending on how wide your broadband pipe is, you can get great looking video that streams directly to your computer’s desktop. There have been big improvements in video compression, in broadband acceptance, as well as a few new video-broadcasting architectures that help avoid the typical Internet problems. Video web-casting systems vary by compression and transmission technologies as well as by physical structure. For example, an Intranet-based video network is usually composed of routers, hubs and network cables strung throughout a facility. Many older office Ethernet networks are 10BaseT that provide a 10 Mbps bandwidth, barely able to stream a single high-resolution video broadcast. Many newer networks are using networks that operate at 100 Mbps or even 1,000 Mbps, wide enough to stream several high resolution or even HDTV broadcasts. Standard VHS, without any compression, consumes about 30 Mbps. Broadcast quality requires at least 45 Mbps and compressed HDTV (High Definition Television) sucks up 270 Mbps. Uncompressed HDTV requires a pipe of 1.4 gigabyte per second. Of course, for most applications, you can also use one of many compression schemes to squeeze these numbers down to something that will work effectively on the company’s network. There are a variety of compression technologies. You can use a streaming compression technology like the very popular Microsoft Media Player, RealVideo and or Apple Quicktime. There are many others as well that can compress a video and audio stream by ten times or more and still provide good looking output. Many companies are using MPEG II compression to squeeze their video down to about 3 to 15 Mbps and enable real-time video casts over the corporate network. Another important development is MPEG4. By using MPEG4 based compression, it is possible to stream DVD quality video using a pipe of 300 Kbps or less. That’s pretty impressive.
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Corporate Video Just as home users and entertainment providers are embracing web and network delivered video, so are corporations and businesses. Large companies are using video for a wide range of purposes, from video-conferencing to multicasting training and information video programming. For example, Microsoft Corp. and independent market research firm Market Decisions Corp. (MDC) said that that one in four large enterprise businesses in the United States are using streaming media in their organizations, and that streaming usage has doubled in the past 18 months. According to this report, streaming media is rapidly becoming a mainstream technology used by large companies on desktop PCs throughout their organization to improve the effectiveness of training and communications, while achieving significant cost savings. "Our challenging economy is exerting pressure on revenues, budgets and resources, yet communications are the lifeblood of a large company," said Dave Fester, general manager for the Windows Digital Media Division at Microsoft. "Companies see the value and cost advantages of streaming as a bridge to improve the communication and training in their organizations while reducing costs." Some examples of these corporate uses include: Mercedes-Benz USA is using its intranet and Windows Media to deliver information access and training that is faster, more responsive and more cost-effective than that provided by traditional methods and media. The company delivers highly specialized technical training to over 300 dealers and 16,000 dealership employees around the country, using streaming video programming to keep them up to date on how to service the latest models of their cars. They have found streamed Windows Media Video is much more effective than static diagrams when illustrating complex repairs, providing an instant "on-demand instructor" via the PC that can actually show repair procedures and techniques when and where they are needed. General Mills is using the television metaphor to communicate directly with its employees. Champions TV, General Mills' communication portal, delivers streaming video content directly to 7,000 employee PC desktops 24 hours a day, five days a week. Champions TV provides an easy and efficient way for departments to include everyone in monthly meetings and training events - even those located in a plant, warehouse or sales office. The human resources, finance and operations departments all take advantage of streaming video, using Champions TV to facilitate regular meetings. Regular programming includes everything from the chairman's quarterly report, the annual company meeting and department-specific meetings to new product demonstrations and the latest series of General Mills television commercials. Travel costs and employee downtime have been significantly reduced by eliminating the need to fly people to headquarters for a meeting or trainers out to education events. Video over the Internet The second type of video streaming technology is sending video over IP (Internet Protocol). This is what most people think of when they think of streaming video on their computers. The limiting factor here is not the quality and pipe at the originating end, but the pipe at viewer’s end. Unfortunately, most of still do not have a broadband (DSL or cable) Internet connection at home and have to use an old 56K dial-up. This means that a 30 Mbps VHS quality stream not only has to be compressed, it also has to be shrunken in size and the number of frames per second has to be reduced. Hence the small grainy images that only change a few times per second. However, the before mentioned MPEG4 compression may well help make it more pleasant to view videos at 56K or even slower. In addition to improved compression ratios, MPEG4 video gets fuzzy as it compresses instead of blocky as most other compression types. It is harder for the eye to recognize and object to fuzziness rather than sharp blocks. MPEG4 also uses layers to compress. This means that boring and relatively unimportant background scenes can be compressed much more than the important people and faces in the foreground of the video. Even if you do have DSL or cable modem, very few of us are lucky to have a pipe at home that provides even one Mbps of bandwidth. Most of us still only a dial-up. However, more and more of us are being linked up via broadband. According to Parks Associates, an industry analyst group, by 2004, over 30 million Americans will indeed have fast broadband connections to their homes. The third type of video casting is what can be called private networks. Using either fiber or leased lines, these streaming companies have a private cable that can cross the country and connect two or more video facilities. Many video production companies use these to enable editor son both coasts to work on productions simultaneously. Some companies like LiveWave.TV are doing a bit of both and use both private networks and the public Internet. They make RemoteStudios that are self-contained broadcast kiosks, and ConvergenceCams that are remote controlled cameras. These systems utilize a high quality fiber connection connected to either a TV station or to LiveWaveTV’s central network operation center (NOC). By sending an uncompressed video feed, LiveWave’s cameras can provide standard broadcast quality signals to the TV station. The TV station can then direct the incoming stream to its control room studio for broadcast over the airwaves, to a tape recorder for later editing and or broadcast, or even streamed out to the Internet. Because of this unique structure, and their own compression technology, LiveWave’s web delivered video looks much better than most other so-called web cams. Even cooler, LiveWave.TV’s remote cameras can be operated over the Internet. You can drive them around the cage or tank, getting close-ups of the fish, whales and Polar Bears. If you are a true voyeur, check out their Rack bar camera. You can zoom in and spy on people in the bar as they flirt and hang out and cheer on their favorite sports teams. There are lots of other web sites that enable you to access video. Some are video only, some provide audio as well. Good sources for collections of web video include the EarthCam’s Top 25 best Webcams web site, Discovery Channel, LeonardsWorlds, WebCam Central, Cams2000, etc. Many of these sites provide interactive web cam experiences. There are also a bunch of sites that provide news feeds, short films, commercials, PSAs and Video News Releases. You can even download clips from movies and coming attractions. The FeedRoom features daily video news packages created by news stations from throughout the country. You no longer have to watch as assembled by your local broadcaster. By using Feedroom, you can assemble and watch only the news that is of interest to you. If you want news from all over the world, check out Medium4.com. Originally known as ForeignTV.com, it is a multi-channel video-on-demand (VOD) network specializing in world music, travel, culture, and news-to six thematic networks. Medium4.com has produced more than 100 special interest VOD channels, creating what they say is the world's largest, most diverse streaming video website in terms of content. Most of these videos were encoded at three different speeds-for low-, medium-, and high-band users and made available for audiences using both Windows Media Player and Real Player. Web sites like UltimateMovieClips, MSN’s WindowsMediaGuide, ClickMovie, and FilmZone are great sources for movie trailers, clips, interviews and all kinds of movie related materials. Some of these sites also feature original materials including short films and parodies. Webcast versus Multicast One of the biggest problems with web video, from the server or website perspective, is the need to deliver individual video streams to each viewer as they request it. Multi-casting may be the answer. Like regular broadcast and cable TV, a multicasting website can web cast a variety of content streams, each of which can be accessed by many different viewers simultaneously. It is just like television. The multi-caster starts the program and as viewers log on and watch. In a regular web cast, the viewer uses HTML to contact the content provider’s server and requests a stream of video to be delivered directly to them. Each time the content provider’s server gets a request, it has to provide yet another stream to the viewer. You can see how this can quickly add up and crash servers that are providing content that many people really want to see. In the multicasting strategy, a single video file is served out on to the Internet and it is dispersed over a network of routers and connections worldwide. No matter how many people end up viewing the video on their home computer, there is only one video stream being pushed out of the server. Most multi-casters will be serving up multiple streams of content, covering various subjects and with staggered starting times. This technology makes it much more affordable for web based broadcasters to delivered programs on demand. Yes, the individual viewer still needs a good pipe into their computer, but the multicasting technology enables the content provider to greatly cut back on the server and bandwidth requirements. Video on the web is evolving every day. It keeps getting better and better. One day, TV and the Internet will be one. Will you watch your programming on an Internet enabled TV set? Maybe you will access your programs on a TV enabled computer? This convergence, the joining of both the video broadcast and web casting technologies will one day enable us to have a single product that enables the family to do it all – watch movies, interact with live TV shows, and even buy stuff straight from the TV commercial. 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