Mobile blog concentrating on mobile technologies for learning
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Mobile Live Video Streaming
I have been looking at live video streaming tools for mobile and have tested several in preparation to writing a blog, but yesterday found that Robin Good had published an excellent guide of 11 such tools along with side-by-side their key features and options.
His is an excellent overview with a comparison chart plus individual product descriptions.
Be sure to check out the comments and related articles at the bottom for additional information.
Web casting, or broadcasting over the internet, is a media file (audio-video mostly) distributed over the internet using streaming media technology. Streaming implies media played as a continuous stream and received real time by the browser (end user). Streaming technology enables a single content source to be distributed to many simultaneous viewers. Streaming video bandwidth is typically calculated in gigabytes of data transferred. It is important to estimate how many viewers you can reach, for example in a live webcast, given your bandwidth constraints or conversely, if you are expecting a certain audience size, what bandwidth resources you need to deploy.
To estimate how many viewers you can reach during a webcast, consider some parlance: One viewer: 1 click of a video player button at one location logged on One viewer hour: 1 viewer connected for 1 hour 100 viewer hours: 100 viewers connected for 1 hour…
Typically webcasts will be offered at different bit rates or quality levels corresponding to different user’s internet connection speeds. Bit rate implies the rate at which bits (basic data units) are transferred. It denotes how much data is transmitted in a given amount of time. (bps / Kbps / Mbps…). Quality improves as more bits are used for each second of the playback. Video of 3000 Kbps will look better than one of say 1000Kbps. This is just like quality of a image is represented in resolution, for video (or audio) it is measured by the bit rate.
Judy Brown is a Mobile Technology Analyst who has been involved in technology for learning for over 25 years and with mobile learning since 1996. She coordinates the mlearnopedia.com site. Judy recently retired as the mobile learning lead for ADL (Advanced Distributed Learning) and is working on other mobile learning initiatives.
Web casting, or broadcasting over the internet, is a media file (audio-video mostly) distributed over the internet using streaming media technology. Streaming implies media played as a continuous stream and received real time by the browser (end user). Streaming technology enables a single content source to be distributed to many simultaneous viewers. Streaming video bandwidth is typically calculated in gigabytes of data transferred. It is important to estimate how many viewers you can reach, for example in a live webcast, given your bandwidth constraints or conversely, if you are expecting a certain audience size, what bandwidth resources you need to deploy.
ReplyDeleteTo estimate how many viewers you can reach during a webcast, consider some parlance:
One viewer: 1 click of a video player button at one location logged on
One viewer hour: 1 viewer connected for 1 hour
100 viewer hours: 100 viewers connected for 1 hour…
Typically webcasts will be offered at different bit rates or quality levels corresponding to different user’s internet connection speeds. Bit rate implies the rate at which bits (basic data units) are transferred. It denotes how much data is transmitted in a given amount of time. (bps / Kbps / Mbps…). Quality improves as more bits are used for each second of the playback. Video of 3000 Kbps will look better than one of say 1000Kbps. This is just like quality of a image is represented in resolution, for video (or audio) it is measured by the bit rate.