Flv streaming vs progressive download

As soon as the viewer presses play, the video will start to play. One of the big positives of streaming media is that only the bandwidth is used that the viewer indeed has watched, as only the portion of video that has been watched had been delivered. Nothing is kept on the client side; everything is on the server side and is being delivered via the Real Time Messaging Protocol RTMP , which is a proprietary protocol, developed by Adobe.

In practice you will very rarely realize weather the content has been streamed or progressively downloaded, unless you look for some of the distinguished features as described above.

Brightcove supports both types of delivery methods, which is set on account level. If switching from one type of delivery to the other, you will find that the videos already uploaded to Brightcove will remain in the original format.

You would think that streaming would be the obvious choice as it has certain advantages over progressive download, having said that we have many customers who use progressive download. For example, one of my clients in Germany switched to progressive download because of the firewall restrictions on German cooperate networks. Right at the top of the list is whether streaming or progressive download is a better delivery mode for their content.

What would appear to be a subtle choice carries a huge business impact for all web video publishers. Technically, both streaming and progressive downloading are methods to deliver online video. Streaming is the delivery of video by means of a dedicated video streaming server to a client video channel. Progressive download is simply the delivery of video files over standard web servers HTTP. Typically, you are viewing streaming when you see Windows Media and RealNetworks players, and you are receiving progressive downloads with QuickTime and Flash players.

However, most players have the ability to do both. Publisher Concerns Publishers start with the simple ambition to deliver video content online, but first must choose the method of delivery. Each delivery solution offers functionality within its technology. Cost is naturally a factor, as is the level of control the publisher wants to have over the distribution of the content—that is, will they want to limit who sees the content or will they welcome viral, widespread sharing?

There are four factors factors to consider. Scalability With a typical streaming server, each stream requires a specific, or fixed, allocation of bandwidth between the user and the streaming server. Since progressive download is similar to a web page or file being delivered from a web server, there is no specific bandwidth allocated to a viewer. The more users, the slower the download, which will result in slower start time, called "buffering" or "loading" in most players. For example, the FLV file can be preloaded into the Flash movie shell.

You can also more easily swap out the video content with a new FLV file if necessary. In addition, you have much more control over your Flash Video when you load and control the video with ActionScript. Publishing times are drastically reduced when the Flash Video isn't embedded in the Flash document.

The disadvantage of using an external video file in the FLV format is that you must use Flash Media Server to stream playback if you need Flash Player 6 compatibility with your Flash Video content. I talk more about Flash Media Server later in this chapter and throughout the book. I would like to receive exclusive offers and hear about products from Adobe Press and its family of brands. I can unsubscribe at any time.

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So if it's a big file, then the entire file of tens- or hundreds of MB's of data is downloaded to their device first whether it's their computer or mobile device.

And regardless of whether they end up watching a few seconds video or a few minutes of the video, the video was downloaded in full to their device. That means, the video provider your S3 account ended up delivering the entire video, even though they may or may not watch it, or only watch it partially.

So more bandwidth cost for you, the creator. And for the viewer as well, their internet bandwidth is used to download the full video, even though they may or may not watch it, or just watch it partially. So more bandwidth costs for your viewer as well. And especially more so if they're on a mobile device and are using their data and have a limited data plan. And that's where " Streaming Video " is much more beneficial to everyone involved - well, almost to everyone involved, which I'll explain in a minute.

And that's because with streaming video, the video is delivered as a "download as you watch" stream of data. The web service Amazon MediaConvert converts the single. There could be tens or hundreds or thousands of such segments depending on how long the video is.