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There haven't been one hundred million blu-ray players alone sold yet; how many PC drives do you honestly think are sold to this date?

http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2009/09/breakdown-on-the-number-of-broadband-enables-devices-sold-in-the-us.html

Others have commented on the problems mozilla have with licensing H.264 decoder distribution. Maybe that could be worked round by relying on a system codec (which licensed or not is the distro/user's responsibility), but there's more to it than that.

The Mozilla foundation's mission is to help the Internet remain an open and accessible global public resource, not to create the browser with the greatest market share at all cost. The MPEG-LA's mission is to extract as much revenue for their member IP "right's holders" as possible, not to further open video on the web.

The MPEG-LA charge software suppliers an IP license to distribute a decoder, but they also have a price sheet for the people providing the content.

  - distribute an encoding application they want payment
  - use that application to encode and they want a payment (yep two different licenses for both the supplier and user)
  - charge for your streamed content they want a per stream payment

Now, as is sensible strategy, they aren't enforcing their charges for internet streaming at the moment. But the current licensing period ends 31st Dec 2010, and the rights holders will want more next time round.

If H.264 works everywhere and becomes the only standard for video on the web, then the web becomes less open and accessible for everyone publishing content.

Now I've no idea what Google pay in licensing for streaming youtube, and what their view is of what they'd have to pay in the future, but they have recently acquired the company responsible for the VP7 and VP8 codecs, so it looks like they do value access to a codec not controlled by the MPEG-LA.

Google (youtube) probably support only H.264 right now on technical merits, they (Chrome) are quite happy to support ogg/theora playback. I'd not be surprised to something new come out from them using the codecs (and people) they got from On2 this year.

Apple are MPEG-LA rights owners; they have no interest in any open AV formats on the web and will probably not implement anything else unless market forces mean they have to.

Mozilla avoid H.264 on licensing cost and support for openness.

Opera avoid H.264 on licensing cost grounds.

Microsoft just wish HTML5 would go away and you'd start using Silverlight (and upgrade to Windows 7 too, please).

There are good arguments for not supporting H.264, at least not until a viable open alternative is widely supported too.

http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2009/03/estimates-on-what-it-costs-netflixs-to-stream-movies.html

While Netflix is not yet giving out a lot of details on their costs associated with their streaming video service, they have given out enough data for us to have a pretty good idea of their costs when it comes to their streaming delivery costs for the XBOX 360 and other devices. Here's what we do and don't know and how it all breaks down.

I stopped buying CDs when the music companies started sueing their own customers.

So I guess you'll start buying again now that the lawsuits are over, eh?

H.264+flash is already done:
http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=9681 (from last summer).

Streaming MediaOn July 27, the BBC will launch its controversial and oft-delayed BBC iPlayer after four years of development and a budget of more than £3 million ($6.1 million).

Wow, after hearing that Acacia has anything to do with this, I am not surprised at all. I worked in the distance education department for a University a few years back. At that time, they were making rounds among the education industry, and sending letters asking for several hundred thousand dollars, or 5% of all profits made from a series of patents.

The patents? "A system of distributing video and/or audio information employs digital signal processing to achieve high rates of data compression" over cable, tv, telephone, and as they were implying, the internet. Their claim was that anyone streaming video or sound needed to pay up. I mean, honestly, transferring compressed data over a medium!? And of course they didn't go after larger University's that flat out told them they wouldn't pay...

Acacia is one of those companies at the bottom of the barrel. Even worse than SCO, because their whole business is suing over patents, like NTP.

Here is the link if anyone's interested: http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=8559&c=13

This is re-aired content. Why should you get it free twice when you paid once?

You are a nut job. The player is free. "Almost all BBC TV content broadcast over the last seven days is available, free of charge." And it's already cost $6.1 million to re-air the content online. Tax payers don't own the content, they have usage permissions.
http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=9651

How about the BBC just calling it even, airing content once, and then you can never see it again. Even American PBS sells its post-aired content.

There is no room in this world for lazy and cheap-ass communists.

1. set up an array of game servers ...like any other online game
2. configure the servers to accept incoming streamed video...as well as queueing protocols
3. provide the users with the VOIP call-in numbers, IP address, etc in order to submit their audio/visual content
4. (Profit!!!)?

Note: Here, I'm talking about having user-submitted audio/visual content to be broadcast server-wide on a public server. This is what I believe the Parent refers to -- not to just six of your friends connected to a private game server hosted on your local LAN. DISCLAIMER: I have not played many online games in a while (short of Runescape, so please tell me if I'm jumping to the wrong conclusions!

Any MMORPG with textual chat most assuredly implements an obscenity filter to keep users from typing words like f**k, etc. With user-submitted, streamed audio (or video or pictures), it would be much harder (I would imagine) to filter out "bad" stuff.

I can imagine my GTA character walking down a street similar to Times Square with multiple jumbotron(TM) screens. I look to my right and watch as a screen changes from an advertisement for Viagara to a webcam feed of "Coeds in the Shower" (Note: the last link points to a related article "Google Video: Asleep At The Wheel" ...not a video of coeds in the shower" ....so return your hand back to the mouse, please!).

I guess the key here is that the streamed audio/video would be broadcast to users similar to how it is broadcast in real life...and probably wouldn't work in a game setting. ...and if implemented, may affect the game rating (?)

--

I'm not an Apple apologist but I'll give it a try...

"According to Cringley - Apple has to keep video quality POOPY to please Walmart."

Just because Cringely offers an opinion for sale doesn't mean it's true. Furthermore, he never described the video quality as "POOPY". What he said was:

"Apple deliberately repositioned its movie offerings to be better than broadcast quality but less than DVD quality and quite a bit less than HD-quality."

- http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060914. html

Better than broadcast quality isn't poopy. DVD rips that are recompressed are less than DVD quality too and that's what you typically see on P2P networks. In fact, they are typically less than 640x480.

"According to Streaming.com 2006 video transcoding study, Apple's video is POOPY to begin with - in comparison to Real."

Perhaps "in comparison to Real" but that doesn't make it POOPY. Here is the announcement:

http://www.streamingmedia.com/press/view.asp?id=43 36

The reports themselves are for sale. You may buy them if you like.

No matter, since this was a streaming video codec study, not a downloadable one. The results of these tests say nothing about the quality you can get from video purchased from the iTunes store.

"So we get POOPY on top of POOPY. Quite a dog pile!"

That wouldn't be true in any case. Neither of your claims are actually true, but even if they were, you could only claim that the result was "POOPY" not "POOPY on top of POOPY". Apple could have achieved "POOPY" by using their "POOPY" codec. They wouldn't need to make it "POOPIER" still.

"The Streaming.com study mentioned above - stated that Micro$oft's WindowsMedia video sucked even more than Apple's H.264 and that folks interested in video needed to forget about Micro$oft."

It didn't say that either. It said "Companies using or considering Windows Media really need to evaluate other technologies." and it never said that any other the tested products "sucked". As I said before, this was a streaming video test and doesn't represent what is achievable in different formats.

I hadn't heard of the Darwin Streaming Server before - sounds quite cool from this review

Thanks Apple - nice to see you contributing your own code rather then just grudgingly contributing back derived code!

Streaming media

http://www.streamingmedia.com/patent/

But it now

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060312-6364 .html

Netflix vs blockbuster

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?typ e=internetNews&storyID=2006-04-06T014212Z_01_N0538 7732_RTRUKOC_0_US-MEDIA-NETFLIX.xml

QuickTime 6, the basis of the MPEG-4 international,...

, it's no surprise that the ISO chose the QuickTime file format as the foundation for the new MPEG-4 standard.

Apple seems the most likely to pursue an MPEG-4 standard-based approach -- not surprising given that its technology forms the base of the MPEG-4 specification.

obviously i'm happy Orb got in the list, even at #50 (hey, Flickr was #51)

but "streaming service," though accurate in its description of the DELIVERY mechanism for your media, has never felt to me like it captures the true positioning of Orb - which is the use of the Web as your interface to all your stuff.

No. Client. Software.

If you've got the Web and a streaming player on a device (and you've got our tiny piece of Orb software on your always-connected PC to act as your personal server), you've got access to the media you want - Orb will do the format/bitrate/screen-res adaptation on the fly to make sure you can get an experience appropriate to your accessing device at that exact moment

today, that pretty much means your media at home and on the Cloud, for example: http://www.streamingmedia.com/press/view.asp?id=38 03/

but as i'll be unveiling at Web2.0 this wednesday the next level of the Orb vision - and its about access and control in ways that don't have much to do with STREAMING (there's a hint for what sorta control i'm talking about in http://www.tivoanywhere.com/)

how would YOU folks name what we do? "Web-based access and control" seems a bit... unwieldy

First of all, video file formats are hardly a concern of "IT" -- this is really all being hashed out in Hollywood boardrooms, and is completely offtopic in a discussion about MS Office.

Sorry, but open standards and all of the tools and infrastructure that support them are a concern for "IT".

Further, Microsoft pushing closed standards and file formats is perfectly on topic in a story entitled "Microsoft Ends Era Of Closed File Formats".

Second, it really boils down to either giving Dolby a bunch of money

Er, Dolby?

Oh, you must mean MPEG LA. You know, the entity that actually does the licensing for MPEG family standards. It has so much experience in this arena, it's actually doing the patent pool for VC-1 as well.

or giving Microsoft a bunch of money

Oops, common mistake. You mean Microsoft giving them a bunch of money: Microsoft has shown they are willing to spend money or pay companies to use their product--buying their way into markets they deem important to future Microsoft business. It will be hard for telcos, ISPs, and cable providers to turn down billions of dollars in incentives if Microsoft attempts to buy the market.

the relative "openness" of one side or another is all politics between the content and device vendors and not something us peons should be overly concerned with.

Sorry, but an open, international ISO and ITU-T standard (H.264) is a lot more open than something that is, you know, not open, as is the current state with Windows Media.

And finally, your fantasy about Anti-Apple Zealots doing whatever the opposite of Apple does is humorously delusional.

Funnily, not using something from Apple just because it's Apple is mind-bendingly commonplace, even among supposedly skilled and knowledgeable folks. Your pretending that it's not is the only delusion here.

I will say that there is a user resistance to QuickTime-based video, but that's mainly because the player sucks, and not because people have any particular opinion about Apple (other than they produce a crappy player).

Baseless assertion. How does QuickTime Player "suck" compared to:

- RealPlayer
- Windows Media Player

Please be specific.

QuickTime Player is a free, commercial, vendor-supported player for Windows 98/Me/2000/XP and Mac OS 9/X. What's "crappy" about it? (Nice troll though!)

One intellectual property shop is currently creating quite the stir around streaming media. Scary stuff...

Streaming media & Acacia

A lot of the radio stations and aggregators I worked with got into streaming and back out following exactly the dot com paradigm. The internet was the future and everyone needed to establish a presence or become obsolete. They spent far too much money going in on a clasic 1. Stream content 2. ??? 3. Profit! plan.

Still, it was the extreamely high American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) rates for internet advertising spot rights that really pulled the rug out from under the professionals in the space. We spent a bunch of time and effort on ad replacement but the gold rush mentality was fading.

As the parent post also covers, the Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA) also had a hand in increasing the expense of doing internet broadcast of music. The Librarian of Congress has accepted the recommendation of the Register of Copyrights and rejected the rates and terms recommended by a Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP) which were based on the agreement between the RIAA and Yahoo. If you take a moment to look at the rates please note "For purposes of paying the royalty, each transmission to each individual recipient is counted as one performance."

Even if the broadcast rates for internet broadcasts were not absurd and excessive, the gap between internet broadcasting revenues and costs would probably still be an issue. From the section describing why a percentage of revenues fee was rejected, "CARP noted that because many webcasters are currently generating very little revenue, a percentage of revenue rate would require copyright owners to allow extensive use of their property with little or no compensation."

I don't know much about DiVX so comments would be appreciated

According to doom9, you'd be looking at using XviD or NeroDigital (depending on your preferences). You could probably cut the average movie down to a gig of absurdly-good-(for-ripped-movies)-quality or so, if you so desired. You could even (if you so chose) keep the subtitles, separate audio tracks, etc. by using a container format like Matroska or Ogg if you so chose. I mean really, another 5.1 or 7.1 channel audio track won't take up THAT much space. For the content I store, anyway, I'd at least keep subtites and the Japanese and English language tracks.

If you wanted to get crazy with it, you could set up VideoLAN and then just make streaming requests over the network for whatever you want (VideoLAN primer article). After you had that set up, you could throw a (few) TV tuner card(s) with hardware MPEG encode and stream TV channels around the house as well. Throw in another TV card to act as your TiVo to record/encode/archive programmes and add them to the collection to be indexed, allowing them to be streamed on demand.

With 2.5 terabytes of space, you could do a LOT of archiving. Once you figure out how to get the system set up to do everything I discribed above, you'd be set until well after we start seeing 1GB drives for $200 or less, at which point you can upgrade to 5GB and onward.

That'd be pretty cool, actually.

Robertson has seen both good and bad outcomes of lawsuits. My guess is that he saw that this was the best way out of this trademark fight - he probably did the math and decided that even if he'd win in the end, it wouldn't make him more than $20MM.

This is Win/Win for everyone involved. MSFT's trademark on X-windows isn't thrown out yet, and Linspire gets the value they expected.

There is a similar story going on in the streaming media industry. Here is the story.

To sum it up, Acadia holds patents on "streaming, downloading and just about every form of digital audio and video distribution out there--including pushing MP3s from peer-to-peer groups, streaming newscasts from Internet radio sites and delivering movies through cable networks"

Doesn't this seem a little odd?

The only new information in this Reuter's article is that the audio recorder built in to XP will only allow the recording of low-quality MP3s. You can still use whatever you want to rip your CDs.

True, Microsoft is trying to guide users away from the MP3 format, which is despicable, but this isn't some heavy-handed move to ban MP3s from XP altogether.

By the way, here's another story from StreamingMedia.com that reports things very differently . . . according to this one, Microsoft has not yet decided (as of March 28) whether to include MP3 encoding abilities in Media Player.

All that needs to be written to bypass all encryption, play limits, and similar mechanisms on a software player is a simple dummy device driver that takes the sound information provided by the program and records it to a file instead of playing it.

At the Streaming Media '99 convention, I listened for several hours to a bunch of Microsoft flaks touting their new SDMI features of WMP. When I asked one of their most technical people what would keep people from doing exactly what you mentioned, or the even more technically unsophisticated step of just playing out the data through a sound card with some Digital Audio interface (AES/EBU, etc.) to a digital recorder, he fled.