Streaming Media Blog

Post 12 - Reaction to the reading, Week 5 (last week, last reading!)

2006-07-17T19:15:00.000-07:00

Well, what I wrote earlier before completing the reading still stands although it's possible I'm being a tad paranoid about music rights. But I agree with Mr Wootten, when I buy music, I view it as mine and I want the ability to put it where I want it. If I want to listen on the computer, I want the ability to have it there. But more than that, I want to know what my rights are. Music companies have a tendency not to inform users about what their rights are. For example, I had no idea that music purchased on iTunes has limited use versus what you get when buying a CD. I guessed so, because I'm paranoid, but I don't remember reading that anywhere. Maybe it's in the EULA. Because we all read every word of that.

If buying music from a site gave me unlimited plays of the music on my computer and 5 CD burns or downloads to other computers/players AND the site could tell me how many uses I had remaining at any given time, I might be interested in trying it. But for now, I'll stick to my theoretically safe indie records (minus the new U2 album which rocks and which I'm equally sure is installing rootkit software as I speak :)

Post 11 - Week 5 blog assignment - Personal experience with DRM

2006-07-17T16:34:00.000-07:00

While I don't have a lot of experience personally with DRM, I will say that it has made me think twice about buying CDs. Now that the Sony thing has happened and record companies are starting to restrict consumers rights on music, I'm much more interested in supporting local musicians on small labels who don't try to restrict where you can listen to your music. If I purchase a CD, I want the rights to do whatever I want for my personal use.

On the flip side, I love what it has done for the book industry with all of the different formats coming out. Books on mp3 is actually viable versus books on CD or tape. While that distribution model wasn't created by DRM, DRM has made such distribution much less risky for content producers. Now, I can borrow an ebook from the library and know it will disappear in a month if I don't renew it. That doesn't bother me since that's what I've done with hardcopy books from the library forever. But if I buy a book, I get to do with it as I please as long as it is for my personal use.

Amazon's model of letting you buy an online copy of the book provided you buy the hard copy of the book as well is brilliant. I've actually done this with another computer book already because it's a training book and with the online version, I can use the "Try this out" sections with the computer program open at the same time. And, the impatient part of me that's unwilling to pay extra for fast shipping was more than willing to pay for an electronic copy of the book.

Post 10 - Reaction to the reading (Week 4, part 2)

2006-07-13T16:35:00.000-07:00

Now we're getting somewhere! Having always been on the content repurposer end rather than the content creator, this is what I thought the class would be all about. I had no idea there were so many ways to get content into different digital formats long before you ever figured out how to display it on a website. Sounds silly, but there you go. I have the bad habit of thinking of content as a way to drive business and at that point, you're trading off how good does it have to be with cost.

Not being an audio/video-phile, I've never noticed or worried about the highs and lows of voices or the differences in the blacks. If I can tell what's going on and it's listenable, I'm good to go. Honestly, half of the stuff we've encoded, I can't tell the difference between.

Even with the brightcove comparisons (thanks TasteTV for replying!), had I not been deliberately looking for it, their video quality likely wouldn't have bothered me at all. I was far more concerned with where the chocolate shop was located and was that anywhere near me. (No, sadly)

I guess I'm just reiterating what our guest speaker said on Tuesday. It only has to be so good, don't over do it just because you can.

Brightcove comparisons - broadband

2006-07-11T21:18:00.000-07:00

So I checked out the two sites I chose on Brightcove over the broadband connection at school and wow, major difference. TasteTV looked exactly the same once the video came up but the Flash section was much more responsive over the broadband, non-wireless connection than it was at home. The other site, Cooking up a Story, was vastly improved. The video didn't skip at all and it was, for all intents and purposes, TV quality. I was much more impressed viewing it here but given my experience at home, I think they might want to balance the quality against the user experience over smaller bandwidth.

Post 8 - Brightcove comparisons

2006-07-10T20:35:00.000-07:00

TasteTV

Layout:
For my first selection, I couldn't resist checking out TasteTV, the indie food channel (http://www.cafeandre.com/foodchannel-videos.html). The first screen was full of dark chocolate, I must have chosen correctly. Given the whimiscal nature of the content, the layered layout of the selections probably makes sense although it was a little difficult to follow at first. There is a 3x3 square off to the right and as you mouse over, the different selections pop out with a picture to give you a taste (pun intended) of what the videos might be like. However, this is just the first section. When you click on one of the scrumptious pictures, a new selection pops up, with all of the videos in that section showing now in the 3x3 square. I decided fate was telling me something and chose the chocolate videos (imagine, 10 videos about chocolate).

Video quality:
Poor, terrible color clarity, buffering failed half way through, stuttered for a while. This is particularly disappointing when someone is talking about ginger infused toffee.

Audio quality:
Ok. A little scratchy.

Overall comments:
I liked the site and the layout execution but I was hoping for more from the video. Also, the video loops if you don't switch over soon enough. I prefer sites that skip on to the next video if you fail to do anything. I may try this one over the broadband access at work tomorrow to see if it's any better. DSL over wireless is definitely rough.

Cooking up a Story

Layout:
Thought I'd try to get apples to apples and compare the two cooking channels. On first glance, Cooking up a Story's website isn't nearly as fancy as TasteTV's. The layout doesn't make good use of the horizontal space, the other videos are listed below the featured video with nothing to make the user want to click beyond the name.

Video quality:
Ugh. Choppy, tiny video (about 1.5 inch wide by 1 inch down). The streaming was atrocious, kept stopping and starting. The quality of the picture was better than the other one, but the dark colors kept drowning out the tiny picture. Postage stamp indeed.

Update - I just figured out how to make the video bigger. It's better that way and the picture quality is still very high, but the choppiness is incredibly distracting.

Audio quality:
When it is going, it's better than the other one. Less scratchy.

Overall comments:
Yikes. I'm surprised Brightcove would choose to feature this one. It's hardly a ringing endorsement for their product, more of a trainwreck in motion. In a weird coincidence, the highlighted video was again about chocolate and the highlighted recipe (above the video section, not integrated) was Ginger Almond Toffee.

I'll check out both of these at work and see if the quality improves any.

Post 9 - Reaction to the reading (Week 4, part 1)

2006-07-10T19:58:00.000-07:00

This week's reading got me thinking about bias and its role in information gathering. Thanks to the author's unwillingness to say one thing positive about Windows Media and his glowing, straight from the Apple website, review of QuickTime, I can't really trust his review of either.

This quote really killed me:

"The player integrates a lot of audio support similar to that found in the Apple iTunes application . Play lists and access to the Microsoft music store are prominent additions ."

Gee. Because iTunes isn't attached to a music store at all, nooo. They aren't trying to sell you something at every turn, it's a feature, not a marketing effort.

Considering past statements I've made, you'd think I was a huge Windows Media fan. Nope. It just happens to be what opens most of the time when I play music without thinking and I know how it works. I happen to like WinAmp better than any of them purely because it's the first player I tried and I have figured out most of its eccentricities. Plus, it plays in a teeny tiny window, something both WM and iTunes seem to have forgotten how to do. I'm not into the whole world of audio player skins. I want the content in a non-distracting frame if I see it at all (I largely listen to music on my computer at work).

If we're talking about what endusers will see, the players are largely the same as far as what they will do. I use all three (WinAmp, WM and iTunes) pretty much interchangeably depending on what format the content is in. I didn't even realize I don't have Real installed on this machine until I tried to find it for class. They're all free downloads, what do I care if I need to download a new player to view some free content? It's a different matter if I've paid for the content, but there, I'm even more invested and likely to download the player. I don't know if it matters so much to end users what format companies use to encode their media, so long as the player is always free.

Final (theoretically) paper topic

2006-07-08T21:23:00.000-07:00

Given that no one will use streaming media if there is no money to be made, I decided to focus on the commercial uses of online content. This is a major issue for the company I work for as we attempt to differentiate ourselves from our competitors and it's good to do a quick roundup of everything available out there and all of the various ways it can be monetized. People are starting to pay for content, it's true, but not yet from sites that don't normally sell content. Travelocity and Orbitz offer free videos and podcasts respectively to tell travelers about destinations and Amazon offers free video talking about books, movies and more. They don't charge for the content as they're hoping it will give users a reason to come back beyond anything the site can provide in terms of discounts and deals.

It's a good idea, but on it's own, it won't work. People already know how to shop around and the internet has created an inherantly even playing field for ecommerce sites. Sites like Froogle (Google's shopping site - check it out if you haven't already, it's pretty cool) make sure the site with the cheapest price is easily highlighted. If sites want to retain consumers, they're going to have to offer more types on online content beyond the basic. At work, we're working on some ideas and I'm hoping that this preliminary research project will generate a few more.

Possible paper topics

2006-07-05T21:25:00.000-07:00

Well, with all the options in the world, I'm at a loss. Here are the topics I'm considering but I'm not sure what type of paper this should be. If it's a research paper, I'm waaaaay behind.

1. Community-created media
This is sort of what I was talking about earlier. A local news site incorporating links over streaming media with forums, blogs, local reporters, etc. I'm not sure if this would be an outline of what such a site would look like or something else.

2. Analysis of commercial uses of streaming media
Given I'm taking this class for work, this seems like an obvious choice. Topics would include pay-per-view content, Amazon's paid placement-type features, content to support sales (demos, walkthrus, etc), eyeball attractors (anything that draws eyes to the site promoting ad sales), etc.

3. Band promotion using streaming media
How much free content is too much? At what point do you start to impact sales, etc? A friend of mine is in a band and has asked me to help them with their website which would make a fun start to a case study.

4. Still thinking. I'll get there.

Post 7 - Reaction to the reading (Week 3)

2006-07-05T21:15:00.000-07:00

Wow, if I ever need a testimonial for QuickTime, I'll know where to go. I've never been fond of QuickTime but I'm also a true-blue Windows fan. Apples make my head ache. His claims that QuickTime works great on Windows with seamless updates has not been my experience. It seems like every time I open a QuickTime link, it has to go download something and then tries to change all of my music file associations. Admittedly, I seem to recall Windows Media doing the same thing.

But the worst offender for this was Apple iTunes - it went through and reformatted all the music on my hard drive without giving me a clear warning that it was actually converting the files. Of course, this happened when I installed my iPod software. Apple does have a monopoly on some things, for good reason :) I love my Shuffle but I'd NEVER buy an Apple computer. And QuickTime has too many Apple characteristics to be comfy for me, at least, so far. Even iTunes is irritating to use. I can never remember what all of the various squiggles mean.

Back to QuickTime, I'm not sure I'd trust it. Given my focus group of one, I would only use it in conjunction with other options. Given what Drew said about Flash being able to morph shapes and do funky stuff with video, it doesn't seem to have much in the way of unique features, no matter what the author might think.

Post 6 - Reaction to the reading (Week 2, Part 2)

2006-06-28T23:20:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I'm starting to get it. Now that we're talking about things the end user sees, I can relate. I know what buffering looks like and I've seen what happens with the content stream gets lumpy (although I didn't know that's what it was called). I've actually seen a lot less of this lately and I was incredibly impressed at the smoothness of the CNN stream. Very professional and high quality yet it loaded quickly. Of course, I was viewing it at work over a T1 so that might have something to do with it. I'll have to check out the Amazon content at work and see if it looks any better. The CNN stream made me a lot more confident about the future of streaming media, the Amazon content, while very easy to interact with, still felt too rough to watch much of. I turned it off after the main interview. With CNN, I ended up having to turn off the video because I kept watching more and forgetting to write in the blog.

However, the constant harping on open source from the book is driving me nuts. It's less than helpful for learning and it also makes the author seem like a totally naive dev with very little understanding of business. If open source was the answer to everything commercial and non-profit, it would have happened by now. Some things work with open source, some don't. Deal.

I did like the bit about rebuffing. Talk about a new use for an old word.

Post 5 - Site with integrated streaming media

2006-06-28T22:01:00.000-07:00

I decided to try out Amazon's new Fishbowl feature. I enjoyed the short films they created a year or so ago complete with product placement and I've been wanting to take a few minutes to check out this content. And heck, they have a pretty good author this week - Janet Evanovich. I had no idea what Bill Maher would have to say to her but that was part of the fun.

I accessed the site from a Dell computer (running Windows) over DSL using a wireless network.

The player is a bit strange. You can just hit play in the window and it plays a small version or you can click below and get larger versions that play in Real or Windows Media. It wasn't entirely clear until I clicked that the larger versions aren't integrated into the window but pop up in the player. As for the integrated player, it's pretty cool. Very very simple with clear controls that are easy to operate and the video was smooth. When I paused, the video froze quickly and unfroze when I clicked play again with no noticable delay. The video in the larger format looked slightly fuzzy, I wasn't terribly impressed, but I did like the larger version for seeing detail even if it did look like lower quality.

The content is relatively long but they've broken it up into manageable chunks by streaming the segments separately. The intro monologue is one section and then the interview section loaded separately. The buffering was very fast, almost unnoticeable. The media started playing almost immediately after a minor pause. The book selections below the streaming media also change with the different segments. I like that as it feels more relevant, less sales-y.

The ad for Cingular came very late in the content, I almost missed it. There didn't seem to be a lot of cause for that but I guess they were afraid to lose people earlier.

Post 4 - Reaction to the reading (Week 2, part 1)

2006-06-26T20:49:00.000-07:00

My first reaction is that video is seriously technically challenging. Luckily, a friend was kind enough to point out that I don't actually have to remember all of the different settings, I just have to know that these settings may be an issue and remember to watch out for them. It's amazing how complex video can get, seemingly based on the differing electrical currents and the desire to restrict access to content.

And it looks like there's no end in sight! I have a lot more respect for TV broadcasting, VCRs, HDTV, etc. I also just keep thinking there has to be an easier way. I'm very curious to see what Flash can do with content, that seems like it might be more straightforward, but hey, I haven't gotten to that chapter yet.

Post 3 - Novel use of streaming media

2006-06-24T21:40:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in one of my previous posts that it would be nice to have news video next to the print version of the story. Taking that one step further, streaming video on the web should be more interactive such that more information is always one click away. The video could have an RSS feed embeded as a sort of ticker where news articles regarding this story are being tracked. Or, if a website is mentioned, the URL appears on the screen, clickable. A news story about a new study on diabetes would be linked to specific parts of the study, maybe pop-up graphs or even a spreadsheet of the raw data for those who want to do their own analysis. Every story would be integrated with video, text and deeper data for those who want to delve further and a community to verify or dispute the story, something like a combination wiki, blog, CNN, New York Times and a university library.

This might even pull media away from the soundbite concept in that stories instead of something to be consumed, become something to be experienced. A story of a death includes places for the family and friends to talk about their loved one plus, if the death was violent, a place for the community to discuss the problem, plus a place for the media to give the facts of the story etc.

At work, we keep talking about making online shopping less of a transaction, more of an experience. Something people enjoy rather than something they check off their list. Why couldn't news media do this? We're already part of the way there with the indepth story pieces that the big news outlets do (see ESPN's coverage of the World Cup at http://soccernet.espn.go.com/section?id=worldcup&cc=5901), but this is the place for the local news outlet to shine and create a community space online. Sports can do this as there are sports communities around the world that all unite around specific events, but what if we did this at a local level? Instead of standing around the water cooler talking about what Rory did on the Gilmore Girls, we'd chat about the latest issues as if they were old friends.

Ok, so it's a little idealistic and it's really asking a lot of people to participate in something like this, especially when they are so cut off from their neighbors. I should talk, I barely know my next door neighbors to say nothing of the larger community and I only live in a town with 4,000 people. But the idea still has potential.

Post 2 - Reaction to the reading

2006-06-21T21:53:00.000-07:00

Well, my first reaction is that the person writing this book is a techy, not a business person. Any business decision is a risk. Yes, you may choose a format or program that's not supported next year. That could happen regardless of which one you pick. Any company can go under at any time. The better way to counter this risk is to keep good original archives of the content and invest in smart, flexible people that will be able to make the necessary changes quickly if necessary.

Also, choosing to support only one or two formats can actually be a smart business decision if you can make the experience for people using those formats exponentially better. There's value in targeting a very specific market and doing it incredibly well.

As for technical "ah-has", I had no idea that media was so compressed. I foolishly assumed that internet delivery was the primary reason to compress a file, I didn't realize that television was already compressed. After reading this, it's a bit of a "duh" rather than an "ah-ha" but I honestly had no idea how big an exact digital replica of film is. I obviously don't own a TiVo.

Post 1 - Site utilizing streaming media

2006-06-21T18:05:00.000-07:00

I decided to go mainstream with http://www.cnn.com. The quality of the image is very clear and loads with minimal work on the part of the user. It functions almost the same way as a text link except that the video takes you to a new window. Ads seem to be minimal, unlike on MSN, and the interface is much easier to navigate. The ads are also shorter. I tried switching between clips mid-stream and it responded beautifully with no stalling. The controls are self-explanatory and not overly complex. Pause actually works as does rewind and fast forward.

The bit I dislike is the heavy metalic framing of the image and the way it has to open in a separate window from CNN. I'd like to see the video integrated at the top of the news article so you can read more about the story if you get interested. I watched three clips, all of which were very gripping and informative. They also felt longer than a usual evening news story, something I actually appreciated.