Downloading on the Internet

Evolution on Video on the Internet

Many people were first introduced to video on the Internet through webcasts. A very popular (and hyped) web broadcast event was the 1999 Victoria's Secret fashion show. The traffic to this event (2 million hits) was twice as big in comparison to another mega event of the time - the day President Clinton was video deposed in the Monica Lewinsky case. To do a webcast one had to setup up on big streaming servers, with sufficient number of ports and peak bandwidth capacity to handle the incoming load. The web media player (client) communicated with the servers using RTSP (real-time streaming protocol) and the handshake between the client and server results in a calculation of the amount of buffering needed to provide a reasonable quality of service, depending on the connection speed of the end consumer. Home broadband was essentially non existent at this point. Real Networks and Microsoft ruled the roost for Internet video technologies. While the Victoria's Secret event received a lot of publicity, it was a technical failure, the servers and the network infrastructure were overwhelmed and most people were unable to get in.

Seven years layer later, U.S home broadband penetration is over 50%. iTunes and YouTube are big Internet media trends, and traditional broadcast television programming is increasingly becoming more about the Internet. iTunes is all about "downloads". YouTube is all about "downloads". Neither of them use streaming media protocols (RTSP) to deliver media. Both use plain old HTTP protocol to push media to the user. This means they do not need to use special streaming servers. This also means reduced cost and complexity in managing available ports and bandwidth in order to scale to millions of consumers. In fact we routinely observe popular videos accessed by millions of consumers, and the technology to deliver is standard, well understood and works.

Downloads

We define three types of downloads.

1. RSS or Subscription Downloads
The media is automatically downloaded and is waiting and available on demand to the consumer. This “Tivo of the web” mode of consumption is enabled by iTunes, Adobe Media Player and Microsoft’s Zune Media Player. This mode of download allows for time shifted and space shifted (offline, portable) consumption. This model of automatically downloaded and delayed consumption is also popularly called podcasting, and is especially suitable for episodic, channel oriented content.

2. Progressive Downloads
The media is downloaded into a browser cache and immediately played in the context of the web site. These are temporary downloads with no content management by the user. This mode of download enables immediate gratification with consumption in the context of the website. YouTube, Hulu, ABC, and other media enabled sites are examples of this model of downloaded immediate consumption.

3. Direct Downloads
The media is downloaded on-demand by user interaction with far more active management by the consumer than is typical in the RSS download model, or the progressive download model. This mode of consumption is enabled by peer-to-peer applications, media stores such as iTunes and Amazon Un-box, and some media enabled IP devices. This model of download consumption is seen more frequently with one-off purchased media, or with users searching for a very specific song or a TV show.

As can be seen from the above, RSS based subscription downloads are especially suitable a vast majority of the professionally produced content. Almost all of television is produced in episodic format – varying from daily and weekly shows to annually produced events such as the Oscars. RSS subscriptions will allow publishes to automatically “push deliver” content when ready to millions of consumers. It allows consumers to watch the shows when they want on devices of their choice – thus truly enabling “what I want, when I want, where I want” mode of media consumption.

Murgesh

Comments

[Mw]

So well written, I kindly point out to you a small typo :)

Seven years (layer).

Cheers & thanks for the read ;]

[Jeff]

Mw - nice catch! Thanks for the heads-up.

Jeff