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One other small factor is cost. Lots of places go with streaming for cost, either to limit the amount of unnecessary download or to add in ads to pay for it (o

One other small factor is cost. Lots of places go with streaming for cost, either to limit the amount of unnecessary download or to add in ads to pay for it (or limit streaming just to their site initially). For instance a live event especially where you want to make sure availability is the best situation it can be. Also for larger movie files such as maybe on Netflix streaming is more cost efficient as lots of people stop watching or partially watch. No need to download everything at .10 a GB for unwatched content. Either way it sucks but it lives on due to market demands.

DarkShikari 17y ago
You can limit unnecessary download with progressive with two combined tools: 1. Bandwidth throttling. 2. MP4 seeking support (usually a server plugin, e.g. mod_h264_streaming or whatever). This way you can use progressive download and still limit the user to a sane download speed.
- drawkbox 17y ago
  Good points. Throttling works well with a good infrastructure and haven't used seeking support but will look into it. Seems like there is overhead with streaming and seeking but maybe throttling is the way to go. Still you'd need to be able dynamically adjust it to the users connection and the data rate of the video, that is kinda what is nice about streaming which is on top.
blasdel 17y ago
Are you kidding? Live streaming is MASSIVELY more expensive than HTTP/1.1 because of the infrastructure needed to support the hard latency and QoS requirements.
- drawkbox 17y ago
  We are talking about real-time, live events. Probably DRM or paid events that require as close to real-time as possible. Sure you could delay and push out chunks of video into your CDNs and then people woudl all be in different parts of your "live" event. For live events streaming is almost always required. For DRM like sites like Netflix this is also the case. Yes HTTP hosting is massively cheaper than streaming but the topic was real-time live events or controlling the content like DRM.

DarkShikari 17y ago

You can limit unnecessary download with progressive with two combined tools: 1. Bandwidth throttling. 2. MP4 seeking support (usually a server plugin, e.g. mod_h264_streaming or whatever). This way you can use progressive download and still limit the user to a sane download speed.

drawkbox 17y ago
Good points. Throttling works well with a good infrastructure and haven't used seeking support but will look into it. Seems like there is overhead with streaming and seeking but maybe throttling is the way to go. Still you'd need to be able dynamically adjust it to the users connection and the data rate of the video, that is kinda what is nice about streaming which is on top.

blasdel 17y ago

Are you kidding? Live streaming is MASSIVELY more expensive than HTTP/1.1 because of the infrastructure needed to support the hard latency and QoS requirements.

drawkbox 17y ago
We are talking about real-time, live events. Probably DRM or paid events that require as close to real-time as possible. Sure you could delay and push out chunks of video into your CDNs and then people woudl all be in different parts of your "live" event. For live events streaming is almost always required. For DRM like sites like Netflix this is also the case. Yes HTTP hosting is massively cheaper than streaming but the topic was real-time live events or controlling the content like DRM.