What is streaming media technology?

Don YoungsFlorida Conference of The United Methodist Church

There are two basic types of streaming• Live streaming – Just like live TV. The viewer is

watching a live presentation

• On Demand – Sort of like going to Blockbuster or NetFlix. The video is on a website somewhere and the user can go view it anytime

There are two basic methods of delivery• Streaming Media

• Downloading

Streaming media• The end user can start watching the file almost as

soon as it begins downloading. An additional advantage of streaming media is being able to broadcast live events. True streaming video must be delivered from a specialized streaming server

Downloading• Downloading - The entire file is saved on the user’s

computer and then opened and viewed. The big disadvantage here is having to wait for the whole file to download before any of it can be viewed. With small files this may not be too much of an inconvenience, but large files and long presentations can take more time than many of our users are willing to give us

• Progressive Downloading - There is also a hybrid method known as progressive download. In this method the video clip is downloaded but begins playing as soon as a portion of the file has been received. This simulates true streaming, but doesn't have all the advantages

What to use?• Many people will opt for HTTP streaming, download

or progressive download because this is the easiest and cheapest way to get started. But you are limited to on demand only, no live presentations via download. Some people start using download and later upgrade to streaming live presentation

Servers• Streaming uses a lot of bandwidth and it’s my

opinion the best solution for either large volumes of demand streaming or live streaming is to outsource to a content delivery service. The basic difference between a content delivery service and a hosting service is the content delivery service specializes in just delivering your media content. Even if you only do downloads, if your content has a high acceptance rate with your web site users, then you’re going to start using more bandwidth and in many cases your hosting service is not going to be happy. This can result in higher hosting costs or in some cases cancellation of service.

• You can do a web search and find lots of CDS. Take your time and research rates, prices are all over the place. The Florida Conference uses a company in the Detroit, Michigan area called PowerStream.net. We store our progressive downloads at PowerStream as well as use them for live events

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File Formats• There are many video file formats to choose from

when creating video streams. The most common formats are:

• Windows Media

• RealMedia

• Quicktime

• MPEG (in particular MPEG-4)

• Macromedia Flash

Pro and Con• MPEG – OK for downloads but the files are bigger

and if the user doesn’t have the right plugin their media player may not be able to open the file.

• Real Media – is moving to become a content provider and is not continuing to develop their encoders and players.

• Quicktime – Great play for the Mac but doesn’t always perform well on the PC

• Macromedia Flash – Developers claims Flash player is installed on over 90% of all computers. Works well but if you are doing volume streaming and have to contract with a Content Delivery Service the cost will be higher than using quicktime or windows media

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• Windows Media – Not always available on non-PC machines but is the widest used format for business and government media content delivery. Later this year, Microsoft is scheduled to release Silverlight, a cross-browser, cross-platform plug in for delivering streaming media

Equipment• You can create demand content with one good

consumer camcorder, a microphone and any of several PC or Mac video editing software packages. After you created your content, encode it into the format of your choice, upload it, link to it and spread the word

• For live streaming you will need at least one camera and a computer with a good capture card. The best card out there is the Osprey. To learn more about video capture cards you can go to their web site at www.viewcast.com or do a web search. There’s also a couple of self contained units that allow you to capture, encode and stream without a computer.

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•Osprey has the GoStream which does a great job but it’s expensive. Another lower cost solution is the vbrick. These are both small boxes that capture, encode and stream to your content delivery service in the format you want to use. There are also some systems like the Tricaster Pro and Sony AnyCaster that are essentially self contained small production studios that include the ability to encode and stream to your server. Most CDS will tell you these units are really not well suited for streaming.

• We have a tri-caster Pro and it has some great features and we use it for all our live events but I found it to be unacceptable for encoding and streaming

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