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ABC Launches Full Episode Streaming
Cjattwood writes "ABC.com has launched their free online episode streaming service earlier today. Shows available include Lost and Alias among others, and are available to watch for free, albeit with ads and commercials. It works pretty well so far, although no Linux support yet as it requires Flash 8." The first episode of Lost on there is a clip show. You can skip around to a segment of the show, but are forced through a commercial before you play. The quality is approximately what you would expect from flash video.
"Only viewers within the United States can watch these full length episodes."
Or anyone with a list of US-based proxies, heh.
Oh no... it's the future.
"The quality is approximately what you would expect from flash video."
I am assuming this is a putdown on Flash video, being Slashdot and all. The ABC site is dragging ass, so I can't actually see the quality for myself. That being said...
Flash video can encode as high a quality as any other encoder. Some of the stuff I have seen looks better than other encoders, and always results in amazingly small file size. Just this morning, I saw a 4 minute, 720x480 AVI go from 890MB to 15MB with virtually no loss in quality.
If the quality is poor, blame the developer, not the tool.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
I'm sure many of you have noticed that movies now get edited down to PG-13 ratings for theatres and then get bumped back to R levels on the unrated DVD releases. I wonder how long it will be before a network (Fox?) does the same thing. See our shows free on TV, or pay a little for the streaming unrated version of American Dad. Or, better yet, Trippin' the Rift.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
ABC.com has launched their free online episode streaming service earlier today. Shows available include Lost and Alias among others, and are available to watch for free, albeit with ad's and commercials.
I've always wondered about sites like this, or YouTube, or Google Video, or any of the other seriously massive media streaming sites.
How the hell do they do it?
Seems to me like you'd have to have Bandwidth Of The Gods(tm) in order to pull it off. Multicast isn't really working on the internet proper. So how the hell does a site like this manage it? If you have thousands upon thousands of people hooking up...a lot of them at cablemodem speeds, how does the pipe deliver?
I know that these sites do, in fact have massive bandwidth. But it just seems to me that hundreds of thousands of people wanting hours of video thorough mutliple unicast would be enough to choke pretty much anything that's not on Internet2.
How the hell do they manage it? Is there some sort of Voodoo that I'm missing?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
"Only viewers within the United States can watch these full-length episodes"
I'm being discriminated against, just because I'm in a different country! That's geographicist, that is! Can I sue?
Hm. Nobody's mentioned this yet, but the flash format enables them to put interactive ads into the episodes. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm much more likely to respond to an ad if I can click on things & choose what extra information I want instead of having an ad lecture at me... When things are interactive I find I invariably spend more time playing with them, too :-)
Think this could make a difference in the overall effectiveness of their ads? Just curious...
You can use a United States proxy from http://www.proxy4free.com/page1.html. (Example Firefox: Tools -> Options -> Conection Settings-> Manual Proxy Config. -> HTTP: 216.12.200.106 Port: 3128) I'm from Spain and I had tested with Lost (just episode 220 available) and Alias (Episodes 501-512) with no problems