Streaming Learning Center

This is another installment in our series of "What Is...?" articles, designed to offer definitions, history, and context around significant terms and issues in the online video industry.

Choosing a streaming technology involves multiple considerations, including an understanding of the pluses and minuses of the streaming protocol used by the technology. This article defines a streaming protocol and then discusses the relative merits of the protocols used by today’s leading streaming technologies.

I reviewed Livestream Broadcaster in early July. Because I don't have 4G service near my rural home, and don't have a 4G modem, I didn't test the unit for broadcasting over 4G. One online reader didn't see these realities of my small town life as a valid excuse, commenting, "I really do not consider this a complete review UNLESS you test this in 4G."

[Editor's Note, 7/20/12: After we published Jan's article, he received a note from Colleen Henry, Video Hacker, Google Video Infrastructure, with further recommendations for encoding for YouTube. We've added that information as an addendum at the end of the article.]

This is our second in a series of enterprise encoder reviews; in this review, we test Telestream Episode Engine. By way of background, Episode Engine is the highest performing option in the Episode family, with unlimited parallel batch encoding, Split-and-Stitch encoding (more later), extensive input and output file support, and simple clustering with other Episode installations on the same subnet. Available for both Mac and Windows, Engine costs $3,995.

So there I was drinking my morning coffee, perusing ESPN.com, and I saw a link to training videos of our American Olympic hopefuls. I'm as patriotic as the next guy, so I clicked the link, and the video opened to full browser window playback. I smirked to myself, thinking, "can't do that in HTML5," and right-clicked on the video to confirm my assumption.

In separate announcements at IBC, Brightcove announced two new products from its recent acquisition of Zencoder -- Instant Play and LIve Cloud Transcoding -- and the availability of Widevine DRM encryption and packaging within its Video Cloud platform. All three announcements are significant, although they impact different market segments.