Interactive streaming
Sep 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Andy Beach
Engage your viewers with new types of content delivery.
There are many ways to share video online, and Flash has become a dominant player over the past few years. Its ubiquity in the market and flexibility in allowing content creators to customize the viewing experience make it a popular, easy option.
Silverlight, Microsoft's response to Flash, appeared almost two years ago to challenge the incumbent. Lucky for us, this has led to a flurry of innovation in a short period of time that we may not have been privy to otherwise. It is important to understand and discuss the difference between these two rich, interactive applications so that end users can deliver their content in an engaging experience.
Flash vs. Silverlight
Silverlight 2.0, currently in beta with a scheduled release of October, delivers VC-1 video as did Silverlight 1.0, but adds a great deal of interactive elements. These include Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR), a way of running compiled scripts such as Java, Python and Ruby from Silverlight (further increasing the options available to developers). It also features DeepZoom, a technology for panning and zooming around highly detailed online images. For example, an artist recently published a site containing a 10,000 × 10,000 pixel image of Barack Obama that viewers can interact with.
Meanwhile, Flash 9.0.115 and later versions offer the ability to playback H.264 video in addition to the already supported On2 VP6 and Sorenson Spark. This is significant because it is seen as heralding both a dramatic improvement in quality and the adoption of a popular new codec.
See Figure 1 for a head-to-head comparison. As it stands now, both platforms deliver live and on-demand video to the end user in a rich, interactive interface. However, they both have different applications when it comes to emerging technologies. Much of the functionality and high quality that Flash touts is tied to its ability to deliver on-demand assets. Sites using live video for Flash currently use the older codecs. Live H.264 encoders designed to integrate with Flash are only now becoming available. In this respect, Silverlight has an edge in being able to provide higher quality live streams, which it achieves by taking advantage of the VC-1 and Windows Media Server infrastructure — something that has made it a popular choice with sports venues such as the Beijing Olympics.
So what do these two platforms mean for live streaming on the Web? How important is quality, and what other features do end users expect? Perhaps most importantly, what does a broadcaster/distributor need in order to deliver streaming content?
Live online video
While the majority of video consumed online is on-demand, much of the money is made with live, real-time video transmission. Live streaming video has been on the Web now for more than a decade, but the quality and technology was lacking to the point of being unwatchable for all but the most frivolous types of content. Today, due to the convergence of better hardware and software, faster Internet connections and, perhaps most importantly, a more Web-savvy audience, live Web video actually stands a chance of becoming a serious draw to viewers.
This mood is reflected in traditional broadcasters' experimentation with online delivery. In the download-to-watch realm, the iTunes Music Store offers music, television shows and movies (the movies available both as purchase and rental options), while Amazon's Unbox similarly offers TV and movies for sale and rent. ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC's main Web sites all offer full-length, ad-supported versions of their prime-time shows. Hulu, a joint endeavor of News Corp (FOX) and Universal (NBC), offers both current shows and a healthy back catalog with limited commercial interruption.
Video-on-demand
The great part about the Web is that not all video has to be live. The majority of the traditional television viewing experience is delivered in advance to the networks that then transmit to local broadcasters. Content can be distributed via IP the same way, and users choose whether to cache and watch later or watch it immediately as it downloads.
What's been lacking is live Internet video — communal events such as sports, breaking news and other live entertainment — that connects people as easily and effectively as does today's television. Beyond merely matching the television viewing experience, the real promise of Internet TV is to extend passive viewership into actual interactivity. This means we must not just duplicate today's broadcast on the Web, but rather broadcasters must do more to be considered successful. The reliability of live Internet video must be on par with broadcast, but the experience of viewing online has to be richer in order for large numbers of viewers to embrace this new model.
Secrets about your viewers
Want to know a dirty little secret about viewers? They really don't know or care about things like format, resolutions or infrastructure. Just as most people don't care how their car works as long as it does work, it's the same with TV today. People just want to push the buttons on the remote and pick shows. Streaming video has to be just as easy to use.
Want to know another secret about viewers? Quality isn't that big of a deal. Don't get me wrong — if the picture is garbage, viewers will notice, but even cable and satellite today aren't perfect. Cable providers, for example, have repeatedly come under fire for over-compressing HD channels to save bandwidth. Furthermore, it's not the quality in a snapshot that's the issue; it's the reliability of the service over time. Content that looks mediocre, but works 100 percent of the time, is probably held in higher esteem by viewers than perfect content that only works 60 percent of the time.
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