Streaming Media - Technical Issues

TECHNICAL ISSUES

Since the development of streaming media in the mid-1990s, both the compression qualities offered by software vendors and the bandwidth capabilities of the Internet have improved dramatically, resulting in greatly enhanced streaming-audio and-video quality. To stream audio or video content, it must first be converted to a digital format and compressed, or pared down in size so as to fit comfortably within limited storage space and to be transmitted without excessive delays. Usually, the content is streamed from a distributed network of servers rather than from a central point, since this method avoids clogging the server and allows for easier transmission to a number of users.

Bandwidth was a major concern to streaming-media providers. While broadband was the favored mode of streaming media, relatively few consumers had actually made the switch to broadband by the early 2000s. As a result, streaming media remained plagued by bandwidth bottlenecks at the receiving end of the transmission, often creating excessive delays and pauses in the transmission, and sometimes leading to its complete loss. The most frequent complaints lodged against streaming media, in fact, involved the choppiness of many of the broadcasts, in which the audio is momentarily scrambled or otherwise inaudible, or punctuated with skips and indecipherable noise or scrambled pictures. Producers and providers of streaming-media packages were thus encouraged to provide separate downloads catering to varying connection speeds.

The streaming-media software, stored on the user's desktop, connects with a server and accesses a streaming-media packet. Encoding software converts the media into compressed digital format, which can then be sent streaming to a media server. Because of bandwidth constraints, compression formats common for other types of media delivery are far too limited for streaming. Thus, a number of proprietary compression formats popped up in the late 1990s promising optimal streaming capabilities for specific streaming needs. The software player generally receives the stream and buffers several seconds of data at a time on the user's hard drive. Thus, these short media packets are played without interruption directly from the user's hard drive while further packets are downloading, leading to a continuous stream. This buffering helps alleviate some of the transmission glitches stemming from network clogging. In this way, lengthy downloads before the actual access of the media packages are altogether eliminated, allowing for immediate access as well as live Webcasting. Interruptions in the stream occur when, due to bandwidth or other technical shortcomings, the succeeding downloads take longer to complete than the downloaded packets take to play.