Will Streaming Media Stick Around?

Mike Linksvayer ml at creativecommons.org
Wed Oct 29 22:19:31 EST 2003


Chris Karr wrote:
> Will Streaming Media Stick Around?

Small niche for real time distribution.  If more than a few seconds of 
delay is acceptable downloading will be preferred.

> Ok, so first of all, what are the advantages of streaming media over 
> downloadable media:
> 
>     •     The entire file does not have to be downloaded at once. You 
> can start viewing the media as soon as you click the link.

That's just a matter of how a client is written.  A file downloaded from 
beginning to end can be played as soon as some of the beginning is 
downloaded (no different than streaming, which requires some buffering 
to give the user an unbroken experience), and indeed I've seen P2P 
filesharing apps that can preview/play files while downloading.  Even 
with multi-source downloads/swarming distribution you can prefer the 
earlier bits of a file so that playing can commence promptly.

>     •     Its easier to assert control over the use of the media.

Or, it's more of a pain to do anything with (including copy) streamed media.

>     •     The media is always up to date.

Except when the net or the streaming server is down or inaccessible.

>     •     Streaming media as opposed to downloading tends to not fill up 
> disks.

Disk capacity is growing much faster than bandwidth.

>  From this perspective, there's currently a control and bandwidth 
> argument that can be made for streaming over downloadable media.

I don't think there's a bandwidth argument in favor of streaming. 
Streaming sucks over a slow link, downloading is slow.  Streams require 
bandwidth with every play.  Unless streams are cached heavily on 
clients, it will be harder to take advantage of client upload capacity 
to expand virtual source bandwidth with swarming.

If streaming were a bandwidth win you'd expect <http://archive.org> to 
push it.

> Using things like CC 
> licensing metadata, the problem of checking if a file is up to date is 
> solved by players that implement license metadata checking.

Similar technologies anyway.  For example, RSS feeds of audio/video 
content as a very simple beginning.  Pushing the ideas behind the CC 
embedded verification URL scheme (which just says there's metadata about 
  file x at uri y), you could easily imagine clients that looked for a 
time range in dc:coverage and looked for updated content when the file 
in hand is "expired".  That's _without_ inventing any new elements.

IMO even where a streaming-like experience is desired downloading files 
will be the preferred implementation.

You might be interested in the Alluvium (streaming experience, swarming 
download implementation) presentation from CodeCon 
<http://mirror.cryptnet.net/audio/codecon2003.html>.

-- 
   Mike Linksvayer
   http://creativecommons.org/learn/aboutus/people#21




More information about the cc-metadata mailing list