VIA Interaction

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Video: Ubiquity creates opportunities

Video on the Web has been a difficult proposition. Competing standards and players made it hard to publish something that you could confidently expect visitors to be able to play on their machines.

A couple of thing have changed that. Top news sites are using video in advertising, resulting in a lot of installations of Macromedia's latest Flash players. Apple's iTunes installation includes the QuickTime player, so more people than ever have that installed on their machines.

With Disney's announcement Monday that it will be making television shows available online, we can expect a large number of people to install their required "helper" application, Flash 8 - which has superior video and audio handling capabilities. From Disney's release:

Combining an all-new sleek, modern design with user-friendly functionality, ABC.com will offer episodes the day after they premiere on the linear channel. Consumers will be able to pause and move back and forth between "chapters" within each episode, but will not have the ability to fast-forward through advertisements. Episodes will be streamed in 16x9 formatting which offers a cinema-like feel to the viewing experience.

Encoded and streamed in Flash 8, which offers the best video quality and allows users on both Mac and PC platforms to watch the video episode, will be offered in two different sizes. The standard viewing size is 500x282 pixels (streamed at 400kbs), and the larger viewing size is 700x394 pixels (streamed 700 kbps).

The Washington Post has a nice second-day story about the emergence of video on the PC: Online TV: This Is a Test

posted by Tim Beidel at 4/11/2006 11:27:00 AM

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