Streaming Media and Progressive Download explained
January 6th, 2007
How do you choose whether to deliver a movie using progressive download, streaming, or broadcasting? It’s an important question for you, and since GravityLab’s business is delivering your content to your audience with the best possible user experience in mind, it’s an important question for us, too.
All all of the major streaming media codecs, both audio and video, can be delivered as progressive downloads. Streaming is limited to sound, video, and text. Broadcasting is further limited to compression schemes and quality settings compatible with real-time capture and compression.
Progressive download works even when the bandwidth is not sufficient for real-time playback; it simply buffers incoming data and delivers delayed playback. However, since it is simply a web server delivering your content through the HTTP protocol, many simultaneous demands for that media can result in a poor audience experience with significant buffering while the player waits for the content from the server. The back end infrastructure of the GravityLab content delivery network provides client / server negotiation for delivering the content in a timely, efficient manner for the best possible audience experience. This is important, since your online user’s patience, speaking in statistical averages, is about 4 seconds before they move on.
Streaming movies do not store a copy of the movie on the client computer, making them inherently more difficult to copy without the consent of the movie’s owner. This can be an important consideration, and is one reason why people choose streaming over progressive download.
Streams take up a specified amount of bandwidth, whereas HTTP file downloads proceed as quickly as the connection allows. It is therefore easier to manage the bandwidth usage of a streaming server than of a web server delivering progressive-download movies. With the proliferation of high speed internet connections at home, and because the vast majority of the US workforce has high speed access at work, delivering video content at predefined multiple bit rates (streaming) makes sense.
Broadcasting allows you to deliver coverage of live events as they happen, or to provide real time “chat” between computers. GravityLab provides live video broadcasts that can scale up as your audience grows.
To sum up, if your movie includes live coverage, you must use broadcasting. If bandwidth management and copy discouragement are paramount considerations, streaming may be your best choice for stored content. If bandwidth is not a concern, you want users to be able to receive you media regardless of connection speed, and you don’t mind if users obtain the actual copies of your audio and video content on their computers and portable devices, progressive download may be viable.
Using a Windows Media Server vs. a Web Server :
A Windows Media server is often the best way to stream media because Windows Media Services is designed specifically for that purpose, and all Windows Media components work together to enhance the end-user experience. Intelligent streaming, for example, involves Windows Media Encoder, Windows Media Services, and Windows Media Player.
This section compares the features of a Windows Media server and a Web server and describes the best way to determine which option is right for you.
Comparing server features
The features of each type of server are compared in the following table.
| Feature | Windows Media Services | Web server |
