How Streaming Video Works

you're probably familiar with the technology. Um, it's been around for quite some time. Um, you know he's tune in and spend twenty three minutes waiting for it to uh buffer so that you can watch it. Or you watch maybe two seconds of it and then it stops, and then you wait, and then you watch another second and it stops. Put it on pause, Gonna make a sandwich,

come back. Or if you have a fast internet connection, like some of our friends out in San Francisco, you don't even know what we're talking about because you just watch it and it just plays as you're Actually that's probably true for most people, right, anyone who's done on dial up? Yeah, anyone who's not on dial upe probably has. You know, as long as the connection is pretty good, you're you probably have seen streaming video without too much

of trouble. Yeah. But um, where we weren't really talking about applications like YouTube when we were discussing what we were going to talk about today, and uh, really what I was thinking about was more along the lines of sites like Hulu dot com. Um. And for those of you who are not familiar with Hulu, it is one of several that we're gonna mention. Um. But basically, you can tune in, watch a TV show, a movie. Um. Really the whole thing, you know, supported by advertising. Uh,

pretty cool. Actually, yeah, it's in a tiny little window. It's not we're not talking you know, full screen. Well you can't make it, but it's blocking, right, it's it's the definition is lower than standard definition for your television. But you know, it's it's the fact that you have access to this pretty large library of content, um, legitimately, which is the that's the best part is that you don't have to worry about the site being taken down

because you know, of violation of copyright laws. Oh yeah, this is this is the actual content providers UM. In the case of Hulu, UM, it's Fox and NBC Universal, so you're seeing UM. In some cases it's way, you know, decades old TV shows, and other instances it's more UM modern stuff. UM. And in a lot of cases, if it's conflicting with current stuff, it'll be a few weeks

behind or maybe old. They'll have just clips. UM. Star Galactica, for example, is the show which they don't have full episodes of, although you can watch the original show and go really, they decided to completely remake this. I know, why remake perfection? You already have perfected people. Okay, this is where I admit that I never watched a new episode of Ballstar Galactica, but I was a die hard fan of the original and if you disgrace it with any kind of comment, I will I will have to

And I best theme music ever. It's the ringtone on my phone, people, And that is not a joke. So anyway, So anyway, but I was going to mention, so we're talking about Hulu being legitimate to give you an idea of an illegitimate one. Uh, there's a there's a site called TV links, tv TV dash links, and UM it was is and was because occasionally it gets taken down. As a site that hosts episodes of various television shows. I think it might have a few movies as well.

Mostly it's TV and animation. UM. And it does not necessarily have the permission of the owners to show that material. UM, so it is that never happens. So it's one of those sites where there are lots and lots and lots

of choices. UM, but you have to if you go there, you're going there with the knowledge that this site could not be there if if the content providers decide that, hey, you know what, this is just ridiculous, people are are watching our stuff without going through the proper channels, UM, then then yeah they could. They could certainly you know, sue TV links and say you can't do that, and uh,

that's happened a couple of times. I mean there are times where if you tried to go to the website, it just you get an error message because it's been taken down. Um. But you know the reason that it was tempting for people to go there because there was they could access things that they couldn't necessarily access easily wherever they live, like in the United States, for instance, we don't necessarily have access to some of the programming that the BBC does. That's true, and they do offer

quite a bit on the BBC website. But you have to be uh uh yeah yeah. If you're not, if you're not one of the Queen's subjects, then you're you're pretty much out of luck. You're subject to being blocked out. Exactly, you don't you can't access the material. Well, the same thing is true in other countries when they try and access sites over here is sometimes there are restrictions where they're not able to do that unless they're using some

sort of weird proxy. Um um, and I want to I want to get back to Hulu in the legitimacy Hulu, but um, I should mention that there are other sites that do this. UM. Juiced is probably the most famous. UM that's not juiced like in You've just pulped grapefruit. It's more like j O O s T. And they founders of actually have Kaza oddly enough and Skype decided

they wanted to do a streaming TV venture. And of course you'd think with that pedigree, you know, with because being part of it, go really but actually they have gone to great lengths to license a lot of content. They've got a PBS on board, the Public Broadcasting System CBS, Sony Pictures, TV, National Geographic UM. So a lot of

people are involved in that. And they used to have a client, a software program that would run these TV shows, but now they offer just a plug in for your web browser, which makes it a little more simple to do that. And that's probably because Hulu, which people used to pick on for having a goofy name, UH, now is um more legitimate. But UM I also found out yesterday that Comcast Interactive has their own version of this

called fan cast UM. They have full episodes of TV shows and movies and things like that too that they have licensed. UM. But talking about the legitimacy of UH of Hulu, UM, I was reading an article in Ours Technical by Nate Anderson, and to quote him, he says it's only a matter of time until the web loses its second class status when it comes to video programming. Well, last night, UH, we're recording this the day after the second presidential debate, and I watched the presidential debate live

on Hulu dot com. And you know, it was probably not a big test for them because you got CNN and all the networks and competing with them. But it was a test and there were no hiccups. It was you know, smooth, it was easy to watch. You know, it was on my computer screen while I was working on something else, I could keep an eye on it. Um, And I'm thinking, you know, this could be legitimate, this

could go you know, big time. Now. You know, Anderson says that people are not going to give out their TVs because that's you know, you got it in your comfy room. You got a wide screen TV. Why would you give that up in favor of an anybody window on your computer? But you know it's here's they start moving into live events. That's that's in a whole different And here's another argument. Sure, what if the TV evolves

into a computer. I mean, there's no reason why television is going to stay in the same form factor it's in right now. But we know that's not the case. There there are Internet ready television's already being produced. Convergence. Man, that's what my you know what, it's the Singularity, it's coming brother. Um. But the no, seriously, the the whole idea of people aren't going to give up their televisions.

They won't have to. They won't have to give up their TVs because their computers and their TVs will become one and the same. So you'll start seeing and it'll

it'll be high end first. It will be the early adopters who will then drive the price down and you'll start to see televisions that are really you know, computers in a in a television form um, and you'll be able to use all these services and their their boxes out there that kind of allow you to do that to some extent um, like the Apple TVs in the world and the you know you've got the Netflix, the Roku right which is that opened up just recently too.

They they had some new deals with Roku and that's uh for this box that you attached to your TV, very much like uh, you would a DVR or you know, cable or satellite box. But you know you've got more than twelve thousand titles already, so you can basically just download the video of the movie to your computer, you know box that goes on your TV. It's shot, you know, it's seamless and um, you know, even things like xbox

and and PS three, the Voodoo you know. Um, these are all hardware solutions that are kind of bridging that gap between the computer and the TV. Yeah, and with services like uh um Verizons, Fious and some of the other things. You've got the bandwidth available coming you know, hiber Optic bandwidth two in New York City. You're set, yeah, pretty much because you can You've got the bandwidth to deliver that real time. Um. You know, you can even get some HD programming on on that connection now, so

you have the same basically the same format. So you've got the right machine attached to your TV. You're you're pretty much set. You can download anything from New Who to use. So do you think programming is going to stay programming or do you think it's all just gonna be on demand in the future. That's a good question. Um. I think eventually we will see more of an on demand model. UM, I don't know. I think that's gonna be a ways off because people are really used to

the whole programming. Like I tune in at eight p m to see this, or I set my t VO for a b M to that's the thing. It's all chipping away at the right it's it's and it is chipping away. I think it's gonna take a little longer

before it actually heads off completely. I mean, for one thing, you've got advertisers who resist that so much because really, when you think about you know, advertisers, what they're looking at is they're looking to try and hit a specific demographic and they do tons and tons of studies that cost millions of dollars to find out when that demographics

watching television. And if that demographics watching television at eight p m, then you can darn well bet that that's going to be the most expensive time to buy ads on television. But if you get it to the point where yeah, they're watching television at eight p m, but they're doing it on demand, so it doesn't matter. You know, you can't just target eight pm anymore because you have no idea what they're gonna be watching. That throws lots of monkey wrenches into their plans. So the world runs

on money, and so yeah, it's chipping away. But until the financial like giants, the whole marketing UH scheme finds a way to to incorporate the whole on demand model, um, you're gonna see a lot of resistance within the industry, I think, yeah, but I think from what i've from what I understand some of the people who are using

set top box DVRs. UM. I think TiVo in fact has a deal with Nielsen where they can pull some of that demographic information and they know even what ads are fast forwarding through and which ones you go, hey, that was kind of funny, and they back up and go go through that again. When you're using the Internet, you can totally track and see how many people are

downloading a specific or streaming a specific video. So it seems like when the companies get over their initial fee or of that, they might say, well, actually I can get more information this way, right. Maybe it maybe that they start pro targeting, targeting specific programs as opposed to specific blocks of time. Um, and there's still gonna be

one live things that people want to watch. Election coverage, for example, the Super Bowl, Uh, you know yeah, and we're gonna want to watch live as it happened, you know what. You know what we've been kind of talking about here besides besides streaming video kind of in a big picture way. Um, we've got a boy I keep using those without meaning to. Um, we've got a little catch catch phrase term that we use here at tech Stuff a lot. It's kind of like stuff you should know.

They have the fight or flight reflex, and if you listen to that podcast Josh and Chuck, that's that's their go to phrase and you should absolutely listen to that, right you should, because they're very entertaining, uh and educational. But a tech Stuff already go to phrase is cloud computing, which is pretty much what we're talking about here With streaming video. The video is unless you're down noting it

to a device like we were talking about earlier. If you streaming it, then that means that the video actually lives on computers that are owned by Hulu or whomever, not like if you bought a video from the iTunes store, download it to your Apple TV and watching on your that's a more traditional traditional as opposed to logging onto Hulu and watching, you know, an episode of thirty Rock or whatever. UM and I thought we could also talk briefly about some of the other services that that aren't

necessarily geared towards the thing that Hulu is Hulu. You're you're getting um television programs and and seeing live events and things like that. UM, but there are other Like we talked briefly about YouTube. YouTube, of course is the site where you it's user generated content. You do find television shows occasionally on YouTube, you're not supposed to briefly, Yeah, as soon as as soon as someone raises a complaint about it, YouTube will move to h to take that down.

I mean that's the problem is that, of course, if someone has a copy of that, they can it can pop up in another location almost as fast as you can take it down, or faster in some cases. But YouTube's men as user generated, as is a video which is another one. Uh, justin TV, which is almost like that's a live streaming video service like you stream. Yeah, so these are all different streaming video sites that really kind of cater to to the user experience. It's not

necessarily a way to consume traditional media and a new format. Um, I was gonna talk about a neat little blogging thing called twelve seconds. Have you heard of this? I have heard of that, Yeah, pretty much about it. You've heard about it briefly, yes, because that's how long you have to You have twelve seconds in order to do a video post. You do a video post's about twelve seconds long. And so it's just your thought about something. It's kind

of like the video version of Twitter. Yeah you saw where I was going with that, um same sort of yeah, nice no ice pounce. I was gonna work clerk in there somehow, but I don't. It just doesn't really fit. I'd come up with some other quicky thing, you know there. And there have been some pioneers in this whole streaming video format that have they've really kind of led the way. I mean. Part of this issue was really came to light during the whole writer's strike last year when the

when the entertainment writers were striking. Uh, it was partially because of the argument about new media and what its place was going to be in the future and m the writers were arguing that they weren't going to be compensated fairly for their work when it was going to be shown over the internet, and then the media companies were saying, we don't even know if we can make money over the internet. Big mess, and uh uh, it looks like now you can see that, you know, there's

it's gaining popularity. So at least the interest is there. Whether or not the money is there that still remains to be seen. But there's at least a port for it. There's a demand for it among the mark in the marketplace. So at least then the writers had that part straight. Writers were saying, hey, you know, people are gonna want to watch television on their computers. A lot of them were saying, Hey, my kids, that's all they use. They

just use the computer to watch TV. Um, they don't ever turn the television on because there's what they want to see isn't necessarily on at that point. Um. And you even had people like like, uh, south Park, they they put all of their episodes up online on South Park Studios so you can watch and you could even watch the newest episode as soon as it finished airing on television. It was up on the site and you could watch it for about a week and then they

would take it down. Um. But everything from the season before all the way to the very beginning of South Park you can find at South Park Studios. So with sort of like test cases like that, that's kind of how it led to where we are now. And then you have you know, internet only programming like Dr Horrible sing along blog. Yes, yes, I'll be applying to the Evil League of Evil tomorrow actually that's not even a choke. What are you going to do like suck us all

into a black hole? You'll have to see. I'll just link, I'll twitter a YouTube post on there and people can can see my application. All right, but yeah, dr horrible. It's a great example. That was Josh weedon project where he wrote this piece specifically to see if it was a viable alternative to uh to to traditional television. Um, you may or may not know that we then has had a checkered past with the television industry or rather

you know things like Fox or the WB or whatever. Um, that would be the television industry, right, yeah, yeah, specific parts of the television industry. But the the issue was that it was it was not always his vision that was going to to make it to the screen or they he would get his program would get moved around really quite a bit, so that it can never really

gather an adiens. So you would have a hardcore audience that really loved a program, but it couldn't get footing with a larger broader base, um because of lack of support. And so he said, we know, why should we have to depend on this kind of delivery system when the Internet is there, and we can deliver directly to viewers reach a lot more people. We don't. We don't have to be beholden to this larger company that doesn't really

care about us. And uh, I think Dr Horrible was a uh was sort of a proof of concept, you know, and uh, and it worked. People are demanding more and he said there will be more now. So yeah, I think the DVD will have a part four so and there may be more even further down the line. I guess it all depends on what everyone's schedules allow. But but there's definitely demands. So proof a concept. There you go.

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