VIDEO


 

The most widely used streaming model is The Video-on-Demand Archive.

A video-on-demand archive is any collection where media files can be accessed on a random basis. The actual media files can be of anything streamable: songs, movies, training videos, home movies, conference speeches, news reports... All you need is a collection residing somewhere on a server, and an interface that allows you to select from that collection.

Where does your content come from?

In this model, media files are gathered together from a variety of sources. Some may be produced in-house by the streamer, but many are provided from other sources -- things such as pre-recorded audio tracks, video productions, and contributions from producers looking for exposure for one reason or another.

Consider, for instance, a catalogue of movies with hyperlinks to the actual movie files. You click on the hyperlink for "The Matrix", and the movie is streamed to your computer where it plays in the appropriate player.

Or imagine a university that has developed a series of videotaped lectures, or a software training company that sells instructional videos for specific software packages. It is relatively easy to encode these lessons, place them on a server, and make them available to students or subscribers on a  "view-on-demand" basis.

Or say your company has five main products — five different kinds of widgets. You make a video for each widget, and anyone interested in a specific widget can just click on the link and see the appropriate video.

Processing your content...

In order to make these works streamable on the net, they must first be converted to digital form. Some works will start out as digital content, but many will not. They may be in the form of VHS tapes, for instance. Typically this conversion work is done by a third party service provider (SSP).

Once digitized, the streamer must decide on the streaming format they intend to use -- what I call the "format of choice". When deciding on the "format of choice", the streamer must decide some things about his typical viewers or listeners. Are they usually connected to the internet with dialup or broadband? Will they prefer Windows Media, Real, or Quicktime format? Or is it necessary to provide encoded versions in all the likely speeds and formats, as some streaming sites do?

Delivering the content...

Once your content is ready to be streamed you are ready to  make it available to the public. In principle, the system used for delivering your content is fairly simple. You put your files on a server capable of streaming the format(s) of choice. Then you create a web interface that connects your viewers to specific files. This interface does a number of things. First, it allows viewers to see the alternatives they have to choose from. Second, if your site is restricted by subscription, or if viewers must "pay as they play", the site includes some sort of authentication system or payment procedure. Third, it includes some method of selecting media, and possibly customized viewing pages. And, finally, it will probably include some techniques for exposing your traffic to advertising.

The most important feature of your delivery system is the bandwidth required to service the traffic viewing your media content. Of course the bandwidth component can be ignored if your service has very few viewers. But as soon as more than 50 or so people become interested in your content you have to become focused on cost recovery.

Why is bandwidth such a major consideration? In short, because of the antiquated method used by the internet for the distribution of media files. I call it antiquated because the internet sees every transaction, every interaction, as initiated by the user, and therefore as completely unique. There is no widely deployable mechanism for shared signals or streams analogous to a TV or radio signal.

And since every streaming viewer requires a unique media stream, the bandwidth used by a busy site can become excessive. Think of what might happen when 50 or 500 or 5000 different viewers watch "The Matrix" all at slightly different times — they are all, hypothetically at least, viewing their own unique stream, and the bandwidth redundancy would be tremendous. Consider how much bandwidth would be saved if they could access the same stream at the same time — like watching a traditional TV or Radio station.

Alternative distribution methods that avoid bandwidth redundancy have been in the works for quite a few years. The most promising is "multicasting" where many individuals can view the same signal. The source server sends out a stream to a number of routers at different points on the net, and these act as repeating stations that pass the signal along to others when a request is made.

But this technology is nowhere near being deployed across the internet. If it is ever widely adopted virtually anyone with an internet connection will have the power to run his or her own broadcasting network. But until then we are stuck with bandwidth redundancy and the problem of paying for it.¹

Cost recovery...

The biggest challenge is creating a viable cost recovery program. How do you pay for this service? As every experienced internet site builder knows, it is one thing to build a nice site, another to get lots of people to try out your free samples, and something completely different to get them to pay for these privileges.

What costs do you have to recover? First there are content creation costs -- related to either creating the content or paying for its usage. Second there are production and processing costs related to encoding, archiving, and organizing the content. And third there are distribution costs involved in getting the content online and out to customers -- primarily server maintenance, and bandwidth costs.

The first two (content creation and processing) are relatively easy to predict and will be pretty much the same whether people watch your content or not. But the third (distribution) is clearly dependent on the number of viewers. In fact many streamers view this as the only real cost involved in streaming. Since content is often produced in-house (for free?), or is already sitting in the closet, this cost is often ignored. The same thing often happens to processing. But you cannot ignore the cost of bandwidth.

When we get right down to cases, the two most commonly used cost recovery systems are the same ones used throughout the publishing and broadcast industries: advertising and subscription. Advertising is generally used where the audience is large but unwilling to pay the true cost of providing the content -- for instance, a weather or news site. Subscription, on the other hand, is used where the audience is willing to pay for the content because it is specialized enough to be of unique value to them -- for instance a training site, or a site that offers special coverage of live concerts or sports events.

So when planning a site, the streamer has to structure things to take advantage of one or both of these cost recovery methods. If she wants to generate advertising revenue, she'd better build things into her site that will create traffic. And once she has people looking at her videos, she can build advertising right into those as well -- either by displaying it in frames that accompany the media content, or by interspersing media segments with short  advertising segments as they do in traditional radio or TV (see my discussion of the "play list model"). For some other ways of using advertising see my article "Alternative ways of using advertising" where I discuss targeting advertising to your audience.

Or if she feels she can generate revenue through subscriptions, then she'd better offer enough quality content to, as they say, "keep them coming back". The classic example is a sort of video club where you have things like "movies of the week", or new things coming on line on a regular basis. This would allow you to generate regular monthly revenue from your subscribers. Another favorite example of mine is the video training company (like www.vtc.com) which has hundreds of training videos on line, with new ones coming on stream regularly, where a subscription gives you access to all of them.

I think that is enough said about the Video on Demand Archive.

In my next segment I will discuss the Live Webcast.