A streaming question

[Georg Liigand]

Hello,

We are going to soon launch a smaller aviation internet television so I am very very interested whenever I hear or see something regarding to video stream. I arrived at an Estonian internet television web portal which has most of the local shows and films shown in TV and you can see them for a small amount of money via internet. What they basically do is that they push you a WMV file and your media player keeps downloading it as I understood and that's how we are going to do our channel as well. So here comes my question. I have understood that we should stream on bandwidth like max 256 kbit to ensure that everyone will get a smooth picture. But those ITV fellas are giving a picture of 1.19 mbits which is definately very good in quality, but has also bigger demands on the connection of the watcher. Now as I have understood so far, to get a smooth picture the video bit rate must be even or smaller of your connection download speed or you will not see it smoothly. But I am starting to think that this is only for live broadcasts and for WMV file streams users just have to wait longer to get the video started up? So it would not be a problem to give a 1 mbit stream to 256 kbit DSL users? And what would those 56kbit modem guys think of such 1mbit stream? I cannot test it myself either, because I have a 2mbit connection at home and the 1.19 mbit starts up here pretty fast anyways. So I am just looking for a little advice from you guys who have been into it more than me. I really appreciate this.

Thanks!!!

[edDV]

A stream usually implies a realtime connection. Most people don't want to wait minutes to hours to see a stream start. Windows Media encoder offers the option of offering several stream rates (pictuure qualities) to match different user connection speeds.

Another strategy is to offer the video as a download (perhaps overnight?) for customers with a slow connection.