streaming excludes your audience
May. 28th, 2008 05:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eIf you are ever in a position to decide whether to make audio and/or video available on the net, please do what you can to present it to your audience as downloadable files, not streaming-only. Some formats, like mp3, and I believe ogg, can be downloaded or streamed at the discretion of the listener. Streaming-only formats like the absurdly named "Real" media files or the various Microsoft streaming formats shut out many potential listeners.
Like most people, I am on dial-up internet. Streaming-only formats are impossible to listen to when they play like "The qu...............ick br...............own f............ox j..............ump...............s..." In theory they are supposed to buffer properly so that they can play continuously, but in practice they almost never do. The broken, pause-ridden nature of such programs means it can take an hours to listen to a short piece because of all the wasted time.
Some specialised programs exist that allow the user to defeat streaming by accumulating it to a file, but the difficulties of streaming mean that this sometimes works and it sometimes doesn't, and if it doesn't you have to begin grabbing the file from the beginning all over again whereas downloadable files let you skip over the bit that did download and continue from where it prematurely quit. But even if you do have a program that collects a stream into a single file, the makers of streaming formats are specifically opposed to this and use various underhand techniques to battle it, such as changing their formats from time to time, and mounting legal suits against creators of such programs.
Streaming formats reduce the options for audiences. Last night I tried to stream 13 talks to files on my computer because their pauses and gaps rendered the content impossible to listen to. Only 2 succeeded. All the rest stopped between several minutes and an hour into the program. If I want to hear these I must attempt again from the beginning. What an absurd waste of my time, the bandwidth of the server, and the bandwidth of everybody between.
It is a waste in another way. I listen to many of the audio files on my computer more than once. If the only way to hear a program repeatedly is to re-connect then that loads down servers and increases their costs. Much better to make the file downloadable and allow the end-user listen to it locally as many times as they wish. This has another nice flow-on effect. People like to share. This means they will pass interesting material on to others, who will may then become audience members for the site. Streaming-only files don't have that advantage. They make it harder instead of easier.
One of the worst aspects of streaming-only formats is that from a historical perspective it forces much of our culture to be ephemeral, so that it leaves little behind for historians to study. This also applies to locked ebooks. What will we leave for future generations if we have forced all our culture to evaporate behind us. We may become the first generation to leave our children an impoverished culture, with a blank gap where our explosive culture grew fastest. What will YouTube, all the RealMedia sites, all the locked ebooks, and register-only sites and programs leave for the future? Nothing except vague recollections.
Like most people, I am on dial-up internet. Streaming-only formats are impossible to listen to when they play like "The qu...............ick br...............own f............ox j..............ump...............s..." In theory they are supposed to buffer properly so that they can play continuously, but in practice they almost never do. The broken, pause-ridden nature of such programs means it can take an hours to listen to a short piece because of all the wasted time.
Some specialised programs exist that allow the user to defeat streaming by accumulating it to a file, but the difficulties of streaming mean that this sometimes works and it sometimes doesn't, and if it doesn't you have to begin grabbing the file from the beginning all over again whereas downloadable files let you skip over the bit that did download and continue from where it prematurely quit. But even if you do have a program that collects a stream into a single file, the makers of streaming formats are specifically opposed to this and use various underhand techniques to battle it, such as changing their formats from time to time, and mounting legal suits against creators of such programs.
Streaming formats reduce the options for audiences. Last night I tried to stream 13 talks to files on my computer because their pauses and gaps rendered the content impossible to listen to. Only 2 succeeded. All the rest stopped between several minutes and an hour into the program. If I want to hear these I must attempt again from the beginning. What an absurd waste of my time, the bandwidth of the server, and the bandwidth of everybody between.
It is a waste in another way. I listen to many of the audio files on my computer more than once. If the only way to hear a program repeatedly is to re-connect then that loads down servers and increases their costs. Much better to make the file downloadable and allow the end-user listen to it locally as many times as they wish. This has another nice flow-on effect. People like to share. This means they will pass interesting material on to others, who will may then become audience members for the site. Streaming-only files don't have that advantage. They make it harder instead of easier.
One of the worst aspects of streaming-only formats is that from a historical perspective it forces much of our culture to be ephemeral, so that it leaves little behind for historians to study. This also applies to locked ebooks. What will we leave for future generations if we have forced all our culture to evaporate behind us. We may become the first generation to leave our children an impoverished culture, with a blank gap where our explosive culture grew fastest. What will YouTube, all the RealMedia sites, all the locked ebooks, and register-only sites and programs leave for the future? Nothing except vague recollections.