In LA

Net connections are not good from Beijing. How not good? So not good that whenever I try to watch any streaming media clip, such as anything on youtube, the New York Times, Salon.com’s Video Dog, the embedded video clips on Robert Scoble’s blog, etc; On any of these I can only see a few seconds of video at a time with long stretches of still frames while reading text that says “Buffering 6%”, “Buffering 11%”, “Buffering 14%”, etc.

Salon.com’s flash-based media player is the worst of the lot. With many streaming media players, if I get tired of watching the video in 2 second bursts, I can just walk away and read the latest Harry Potter novel, then return, rewind the clip, and watch the now-fully-buffered clip in its entirety. The player for Salon.com’s video dog, if left alone for a bit, apparently erases its buffer and jumps back to the beginning of the clip. Thus, unless I’m prepared to sit there and monitor the buffering of the clip and hit the rewind and play buttons during the window of opportunity, I do not get to see the clip at all.

Speaking of streaming media, “goodbye and good luck” to Calvert DeForest (AKA Larry “Bud” Melman), we hardly knew ye
The existence of this clip illustrates the value of the common archive that occurs when ordinary people are given the ability to record and preserve media, hooray for VHS.

I believe there are reasons to provide streaming media, which I’ll explain below, but any instance of streaming media on a web page should always be accompanied by a link that users can click to download the video as a file.

I wrote to Salon.com a year ago, asking if they would please make their video files available for download, not just as streams. They responded that this was not possible because the videos contain bits of copyrighted media. This is an unnecessary and particularly gutless bit of rationalization. Salon.com is a publication and can easily justify its redistribution of these excerpts of tv shows as commentary, protected as “fair use” under U.S. copyright law. Their stance is both gutless and bizarre –in what way is providing media on which you do not own the copyright any better when provided as a stream rather than a file? I guess we’ll find out for sure if YouTube tries the “but we only provide streaming media” defense in the billion dollar Viacom vs. YouTube lawsuit.

Ranting aside, I admit there is one very good reason to use streaming media on a site. With a good net conection, playback of streaming media starts instantly and requires no download. Not only does playback of streaming media begin just after the user clicks the media, but the better streaming servers (QuickTime, Windows Media) can adjust the bandwidth of the video to match the user’s net speed. It is of course, also possible for playback of certain kinds of downloaded files to begin immediately (QuickTime files), but not with the same level of bandwidth control.

But another reason to use streaming media is dumb and evil. The logic probably goes something like this

If I, the company hosting the video, provide a file to users as a stream and not as a download, then the user can’t keep the file and do nefarious things with it. Thus I keep the level of control I desperately need over the media and its distribution.

Dumb dumb dumb. This begins with the assumption that people who plan to watch the video you provide have criminal intentions that can be thwarted by not providing them with an actual video file. It’s that kind of lack of trust that leads to unnecessary technological stumbling blocks that just make things more difficult for ordinary non-criminal users. And the stumbling blocks are annoying rather than effective –the desired level of control over a stream is barely possible (for the moment it’s possible to surreptitiously download video files from YouTube and some other streaming flash sites, and I am grateful, because otherwise I would never be able to watch these videos).

So while it’s great that users are putting more and more video online, it is unfortunate that much of this video is available only as streaming media, which us reasonably law abiding users can’t put on an ipod, and can only watch in excruciatingly low quality (due to streaming servers’ bandwidth control features) on sub-amazing net connections if at all.

On the bright side, due to the popularity of the iPod and other mp4 video devices (I’m trying to not be a total Apple partisan here), plus the fact that Apple put podcasting features and a free and easy to use podcast directory into their ubiquitous iTunes software (gotta give ‘em huge props for that), downloadable video files are becoming much more common. I found a video podcast of the aforementioned Scoble show in the iTunes Music Store’s podcast directory. These are downloadable mp4 versions of the same video clips I could not watch as inline streaming flash video on the Scobleizer blog. The New York Times also puts many of its video clips online in a series of video podcasts, though they inexplicably miss the ones I’d actually like to watch, like the video about Chinese adoptee Cece Nealon-Shapiro’s bat mitzvah, which is only available as a stream.

Everything I’ve said above also applies to audio streams. The Recidivism blog republished NPR’s great Fresh Air interview with Sacha Baron Cohen as an mp3 file. Previously it was available only from NPR’s site as a stream and as that blogger says “Streams are completely useless when I’m trying to use my device (acrylic push-button model) in the car”. A comment on that blog post mentions that NPR has taken the audio stream down, so the existence of this user-hosted mp3 file may be the only way to hear the interview. This is a great example of two reasons why such files should be available for download rather than just as streams: users should be able to listen to such audio clips on the device of their choosing, and interesting files can have more staying power if they are not only hosted as streams that might be taken down at any moment. Imagine the photographic evidence of history that would be lost if all daguerrotypes had only been available for viewing in one building, which then burned to the ground.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 at 1:17 pm and is filed under Apple, China, Geeky, Media, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.