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Progressive Download vs Streaming »

When delivering video on the web, you probably would have wondered whether to use a streaming server or not. There are quite a few articles on the web and they are very useful. I just wanted to summarize my experience on this here.

Progressive Download: This is a better solution when your clips are small, say less than 15 seconds. Users would not experience any delay, when the clips are small. In fact, the good thing (or the bad thing) about progressive downloads is that the media completely gets downloaded onto the user’s machine. This makes it play seamlessly even when there are minor network hiccups. Also, contrary to popular belief, progressive downloads does not mean that users have to wait until the complete file is downloaded. These days, all media players, are smarter. They can start playing the video, when they have buffered more than 3-5 seconds. The major drawback with Progressive Downloads is that files are stored locally on the user’s machine and they can re-distribute it, if they wish to do so.

Streaming Video: This is a good solution, when the files are large. In order to stream a video well, you first need to understand the bitrate you would like to encode the video. If you encode a video, say at 1.2Mbps, and if your users have 512kbps, the video would not play seamlessly. Not only that, when there are network hiccups, there are chances that certain frames of the video are skipped. This is very annoying, when you want to provide a high quality video to your users. Of course, you always have the option of encoding at different settings, low, medium and high. Another issue is that setting up streaming servers are expensive. There are quite a few open source streaming servers for flash, like Red5, lighthttpd and nginx. But most likely, you would have to manually set these up. On the Windows platform, Windows Enterprise Edition comes with a streaming server, so it is relatively easy, though hosting providers usually charge little extra for Windows Enterprise Edition.

If you want an example of both, check out http://www.tsebs.info for Progressive Download. For Streaming, try http://www.ivirtual.in/why-ivirtual.html. Both use Windows Media Player. So, I suggest that you test them on IE7+ on Windows. It will also work on Firefox on Windows. It is little painful to get the links working on Mac.

Online advertisement revenue is not directly proportional to website traffic »

There is a myth amongst bloggers and other website owners that the more traffic they generate, the more ad revenue they make. 5 years back, probably, it was believable. But if we look at some of the heavy weights, like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, none of them are profitable yet. While Twitter and Facebook are on one side, YouTube is pretty interesting. It has lot more overhead when compared to the other two. We have a first hand experience maintaining a high volume video site (check out http://www.thescoutingedge.com). If the pain of encoding a 90 minute game into 150+ high res and low res clips is on one side, the infrastructure needed (download servers, application servers, backups etc) is really daunting. If Google did not buy YouTube, I wonder how the original owners could have ever supported this beast.
As per Credit Suisse Report, YouTube could lose upto $470 million in 2009. That is a lot of money, for any company in this economy. The point being that inspite of being an online leader in video, why is it not being profitable? There are tons and tons of people visiting the site every day, so logically, there should be lot of revenue through Ads alone. See the MSNBC video below discussing why advertisers shy away from sites like YouTube and why premium content is important for Ad revenue generation.