Streaming video on the Internet

The great benefit of the Internet is that it facilitates quick and easy information sharing. But until a few years ago, the vast majority of the information that could be easily transmitted was just text and photographs; anything else was just to “big” to be carried online. With the steep climb in the numbers of people with access to broadband, however, the “streaming” of multimedia (information in audio and video format) can be much more easily carried out.

What is streaming?

Streaming media is multimedia that is continuously received by the user while it is still being sent by the provider. During the late 1990s greater network bandwidth, as well as the increased used of standard protocols, meant the streaming of media became much easier.  Although video content, for example, is still relatively “large”, it generally compressed for both storage purposes as well as streaming. In other words, the reason that each time you see a YouTube clip it appears grainy or pixelated, is that if it were presented in its best possible quality it would take far longer for you to download.

Streaming media needs to be defined differently to the downloading and storing of media on your hard drive – the two can be easily confused. For example, you can download an entire film at high quality to store on your hard drive, which could take days and take up as much as a gigabyte of your storage space. Streaming, on the other hand, is instantaneous and is not stored on your computer: once you close the browser window it is opened up in, it’s gone.

“On demand” or “live” streaming?

Media streams can be “on demand” or “live”. If they are “on demand”, they are stored on a server to be to be transmitted at the user’s request. This is how YouTube works, for example. Live streams, on the other hand, are only available at one time, as in a video stream of a live sporting event through a program such as SopCast or the use of video messaging / telephony with VoIP services.

The future of streaming

Streaming media has a very bright future. Already, many people have ditched TV, whether analogue or digital, to watch their favourite TV shows online, whether illegal copies of professionally made shows, legal content streamed by organisations such as the ABC, SBS or BBC, or “user-generated content”. (This is amateurs taking media into their own hands and distributing it). Corporate boardrooms are increasingly integrating streaming video to avoid the need to huddle around conference telephones. Meanwhile, “newspapers” such as the Fairfax group are realising that streaming video on their websites is crucial for catching the eye of an increasingly visually-orientated generation. In addition, more and more companies are integrating streaming video onto their websites, with recent research saying that online video streaming advertising is set to hit a net worth of US$5 billion in five years time*.

*source: Borrell Associates