Checklist For a Video Streaming Website

Posted on August 6, 2022 by dayat

As an IT personnel servicing multiple clients, it’s not unusual to receive requests for products upgrade from customers. The Internet has indeed evolved, from text-based websites to multimedia-rich contents. And as with every progress made, you either adapt or get left behind.

So the case turned out during a meeting with a client, who having just heard of the new way of transmitting live video over the Internet, requested that it be built into his website. He had an upcoming seminar and in order to break the distance barrier, the event had to be streamed live over the Internet. This was an uphill task, since I had not researched much into the new technology called video streaming.

Transmitting a live event from a location to other places is not new, news outfits like CNN and Fox have being able to broadcast live using satellite links. Improvement in video technologies, higher computing power and lower bandwidth cost set the stage for live broadcast of audio and video contents over the Internet. Achieving efficiency with new technologies means a marrying of the old with the new.

The Internet set the stage for live video streaming, with its high speed Internet connection and advanced video compression techniques. To however broadcast video from your website, you may have to do a checklist so you can get the best out of your investment.

Before You Set Up Video Streaming

1. Whether to stream or not to stream. It is one thing to deploy cutting edge technology on your website, its usefulness is another thing entirely. Do not integrate video streaming into your website if it will not reinforce your design objective. The cost of video hosting and bandwidth required is much higher than that for a conventional website. If it is a business site, then the increased cost must be justifiable.

Alternatives could be using graphics and text to tell the story, or transcription of the videos into text versions. Another alternative is using YouTube, you can display an image from the video, write a summary and place a link to the video’s location on YouTube. On YouTube your videos are hosted for free, and they can be watched on-demand.

2. Live streaming or Video on Demand. On-line video streaming comes in two forms – live streaming and Video on Demand. Live streaming is real-time broadcast over the Internet; your viewers can only watch the videos as you broadcast them. A missed scene cannot be replayed, and the contents cannot be saved on the computer of the viewer. These are appropriate for high profile meetings, seminars, breaking news and other visuals that are best enjoyed when viewed real time.

For Video on Demand, the videos are saved on the server and can be watched at any time. Packaged programs, musical videos, adverts, are examples of videos suitable for Video on Demand. Videos on you tube are on demand, they can only be downloaded if you’ve got a download manager.

Live streaming requires more hardware – capture cards, web-cams, video recorders, video compression utilities, broadband Internet access etc. It requires more precision, leaving room for no mistakes. Video on Demand less hardware – usually a PC and Internet connection. Your kind of contents and presentation should decide the form of video streaming chosen.

3. Self hosting or hosting by Content Delivery Network. Most web hosts offer video streaming support, so you could host your videos directly on the server that hosts your site. You manage your video streaming from the same window as your website, and you’re completely responsible for the administration.

You could also use the services of Content Delivery Networks who host your videos separately. You are given a separate control panel to manage your videos, and this reduces the weight on your site’s administration and management.

The two options have their pros and cons, but you’ll have to decide which is best for you. Hosting and managing your videos yourself, or having your videos hosted by a separate platform.

One clear advantage of Content Delivery Networks is that they’re uniquely designed to manage your videos, so you should get better value per Dollar spent on video streaming.

4. Quality vs size of your videos. Bit-rate is defined as the frequency of data that is transmitted every second. A bit-rate of 64 k bps means that 64 bits of data is transmitted every second. Transmission of data is measured this way. As a rule, the larger the video file, the higher the bit-rate, and the higher the bandwidth needed to transmit it over the Internet.

Every time I compress a video file, I reduce the size and also the quality, so that the bandwidth needed for transmission is reduced. The reason for compressing video is cost, smaller bandwidth is cheaper. But while trying to reduce the size of the video, you should not lose sight of the fact that the quality would be compromised.

A factor also to consider when setting the bit-rate is available bandwidth for households. If in a bid to broadcast high quality videos, I choose a bit-rate of 512 k bps for my videos. Without considering that most of my audience only have access to 256 k bps or lower, I risk losing them.

5. Having your videos on your home page or other pages. Placing your video on your home page means your video has to be played each time your site is visited. Delay in loading means that your visitors might not wait to watch them. When they are placed on other pages inside your site, your visitors have the choice of visiting the pages to view them. That way they can wait even if the videos takes a longer time to play.

Having your videos inside your website is also cost saving. Since you are charged per download. If your video is on the home page, you are billed whenever someone visits the site. Most times they never stay to watch the video. However, videos embedded inside the website are billed as visitors click on their links to watch them. You get better value for your money because more of your visitors actually watch the videos.

The list is not exhaustive, but the points outlined are pertinent before setting up video streaming on your website. Other issues like which hosting platform, the streaming media, video file to support etc will be considered along the way.

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How Does Video Streaming Work?

Posted on June 6, 2022 by dayat

Since the advent of the internet, doing many interactive things including video streaming has become possible. The power of dynamic internet allows a person to transmit both audio as well as video at very high speeds; so that things like video streaming and teleconferencing become possible. In essence, video streaming is nothing more than taking a video and audio signal at the source and transmitting across the internet. This allows you to send any interactive video stream to any website that can receive dynamic data. The website that is displaying the video stream must have a special script that can show your video and audio stream.

You can easily create video streaming with nothing more than a simple microphone and a webcam or you can use more advanced equipment to generate the required signal. In addition, you will need some sort of an encoder software that will help you to transform the signal into a continuous stream. In order to achieve this, the streaming data have to be broken into packets and each packet needs to be checked at the moment of streaming in order to make sure that the data integrity is maintained. If there is an encoding problem, this can cause the loss of the coherence of the visual data, which can cause problems at the reception end as well. Otherwise visual frames as well as audio packets will be dropped during transmission and this can make the broadcast lose its overall coherency. Usually, the signal integrity can depend on your internet connection speed, as well as the quality of the line itself. Your internet connection should be good enough so that the data packets are also being forwarded to your ISP with minimal loss. In addition, your connection should have an overall stability for extended periods of time since internet broadcasting o streaming will usually take place for some time. An unstable connection can cause lot of dropped frames in your video stream.

The most popular type of encoding in video streaming is flash streaming. The greatest advantage of flash streaming is that it can be played back in any kind of a browser. You can easily use Internet Explorer, Firefox Mozilla, Google Chrome or even Opera to play back any flash streaming regardless of the computer or the operating system that is being used. Hence, whether the user is using an Apple computer or a classic PC won’t matter and even using Windows or Linux will not make a difference in playing back the stream. However, the main problem with flash streaming is the fact that it will use a larger amount of bandwidth and this can make it an issue in terms of bandwidth availability.

The second type of encoding mechanism that you can use is Shoutcast streaming. In fact, shoutcast streaming is a very popular streaming method that has been in use for over a decade. It is especially used for audio streaming and for internet radio stations, since it is an inexpensive and easy way of streaming. The shoutcast streaming encoder actually uses a sort of MP3 encoder that is Winamp compatible, so that it can be played back in variety of different platforms including Winamp player as well as VLC player. Especially, many online radio stations have popped up after the usage of Shoutcast streaming. However, the main disadvantage of Shoutcast streaming is the fact that especially video signals can be hard to playback in different type of browsers. Thus, you may end up using different scripts for different browsers and this may not be necessarily sensible for a website that displays video streaming. However, for audio streaming Shoutcast still remains the best option.

Almost all of the encoders for video streaming as well as audio streaming can be found for free on the internet. However, you will need to use some sort of a data service provider to provide a server for your streams. These encoders will send the video stream or the audio stream to the streaming server and the streaming server will send the signal to the whole of the internet. Of course, anytime that someone watches your video stream, then it will use that much of bandwidth from the server itself. For example, if you are streaming at 128 kps, then this will mean that the person who is watching your video stream will also be using a 128 kps of the bandwidth. So, if you have many people watching your video stream, then this can cause a lot of bandwidth to be used immediately by the server. In fact, with a simple calculation, if 50 users watch your video stream or your internet video broadcast continuously for a month; it can use as much as 50 GB of bandwidth from your server and from your service provider. Hence, this can cause large bills from your service provider.

Thus, it is essential that you choose a service provider that is able to give you affordable rates for the amount of listeners that you will have on your stream. In addition, some stream bandwidth providers will give you a fixed amount of bandwidth and they will charge you only for that, while some stream bandwidth providers can give provide you with a pay as you go system. In order to choose the correct stream service provider, you will need to have some idea of how many people will watch your stream or broadcast. Of course, needless to say, your service provider should also make sure that they provide continuous support for your video streaming broadcast. Furthermore, script support should also be provided, so that you can embed a compatible script on your website. This way, you can make sure that your video stream can reach as large number of people as possible. In the end, you can do a lot of interesting activities with video streaming and you can even start your own internet TV station or your own online radio. So, start looking at your options and start your personal internet broadcasting today.

Dr. UGUR GUVEN is an Aerospace Engineer (PhD). He has worked as the Technical Director of various TV Channels and he is currently a Technical Consultant to many TV channels today. Dr Guven has been involved with advancement of internet tv broadcasting and video streaming technology since 2000.

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