4 ms·
Timing _is_ important. For example, even with fast DSL, it takes an hour before you can watch a torrent while stuff on Hulu or iPlayer starts right away. The fi
by notauser 18y ago
Timing _is_ important. For example, even with fast DSL, it takes an hour before you can watch a torrent while stuff on Hulu or iPlayer starts right away. The files are larger, but who cares? Most people are time limited, not transfer limited.
It's not inconceivable that a high bandwidth broker that trans-codes large static files into streaming media (especially if coupled with a quality down converter) would be beneficial for some uses.
However, the bandwidth and computational power required, plus the difficulty of explaining what it did and how to use it, plus the availability of services like Megastic, Hulu and iPlayer, would probably make such a service a good candidate for the dead pool.
- mseebach 18y agoYouTube transmits the absolute minimum amount of data required to display a video at your client. The guy and his Microsoft friends can intercept the data all they want, but unless they are lowering the quality of the video, no win. There are some examples where this will work - long websites with lots of content, pictures and ads - e.g. news organisations etc. The Opera browser on my cellphone runs sites through an image compressor, so I only get a colored rectangle at first, then a very low quality version once I scroll to it, and finally, I can activate a function to get the full pic. It's basically the same thing happening. Another thing, especially older Wordpress blogs don't rescale images server-side, they do it in the IMG tag - that hurts on slow connections. Unfortunately, fixing Wordpress is already happening.