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Holtz Communications + Technology

Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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Download or stream? Everything old is new again

I’ve been chewing on something Steve Gillmor said.

Speaking last week at a meeting I attended of the RSS/Blog SIG of the East Bay IT Group (ebig), Gillmor tossed off this observation during a converation after the meeting broke up:

“Streaming is dead.”

Gillmor was at the meeting to speak on attention.xml (which I’m still chewing on; more later), but I was struck by the “streaming is dead” observation. After all, I still hear from most communicators who work on intranets that they continue to struggle to get buy-in from management (or IT) to let them stream video or audio.

Gillmor’s observation is based on the greater usefulness of a multimedia file that resides on your hard drive versus one that is streamed to you. It’s far easier to jump around to the part you want to see or hear. There are even ways to bookmark those spots. You can transfer the file to other devices; more and more portable media players are sporting video capabilities.

Streaming became popular as an alternative to downloading back in the dial-up days when downloading a video file could take a full day and hard disk space was at a premium.

Today, with broadband connections, such downloads are much faster, and disk space is cheap. More important, though, is the idea that you can subscribe to audio or video files and have them download without your intervention so they’re waiting for you when you need them. That’s the idea behind podcasting, which lets you set up a subscription to a podcast so your podcatcher software can grab the new file as soon as it’s available. And if you haven’t seen ESPN’s “Motion to Go,” you need to go see it. Once you sign up for the free service (which requires broadband), the latest sports news is downloaded during times your PC is idle, so the video clips are waiting for you when you visit the site. These aren’t the choppy, grainy streams to which we’ve become so accustomed. These are high-quality videos with CD-quality sound.

Typical of business, most organizations are still at the stage of adopting streaming media—or they’re not even that far along yet. Streams will still have some value. There is still a large segment of the population without broadband, and streams would still be my choice for vlogs (video blogs); if I subscribed to a bunch of those, my computer would be working overtime grabbing all the various video files. But by and large, after considerable chewing, I’ve come to the conclusion that Gillmor is right. Streaming is so, like, 15 minutes ago. Downloading is in again. How retro.

Comments
  • 1.Actually, streaming isn't going to be replaced by downloading. Rather streaming is going to move off of dedicated servers and down to end user PCs. The same broadband connections and ample supply of disc space on PCs that make them great for downloading also make them great for streaming media direct from one machine to another. No fancy setups, no uploading to servers, just plug your camera in, fire up your PC and start broadcasting. The company I'm with (OliveLink) has this in beta right now and we've got users around the world pumping out all kinds of high quality audio and video. When the product goes public later this year it's going to give anyone with a videocam and a broadband connection the ability to run their own network from their bedroom. Very cool stuff.

    Sage Osterfeld | February 2005 | San Diego, CA

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