Internet video

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Internet video (also known as online video) is digital video that is distributed over the internet. Internet video exists in several formats, the most notable being MPEG-4i AVC, AVCHD, FLV, and MP4.

Contents

There are several online video hosting services, including YouTube. In recent years, the platform of internet video has been used to stream live events. As a result of the popularity of online video, notable events like the 2012 U.S. presidential debates have been streamed live on the internet. Additionally, internet video has played an important role in the music industry as a medium to watch music videos and increase exposure of songs.

Video file formats

Practical online video streaming was only made possible with advances in data compression, due to the impractically high bandwidth requirements of uncompressed video. Raw digital video requires a bandwidth of 168 Mbit/s for SD video, and over 1  Gbit/s for FHD video. [1]

MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding)

H.264/MPEG-4 AVC is the most widely used video coding format on the Internet. It was developed in 2003 by a number of organizations.

AVCHD (Advanced Video Coding High Definition)

AVCHD, or Advanced Video Coding High Definition, uses one of the more efficient video coding formats. It was announced in May 2006 and since then has grown into a high-quality video format that can compete with other professional forms of media. The AVCHD is geared towards consumer shooters; this is largely because the AVCHD format capitalizes on the H.264/MPEG-4 video that is able to compress video to smaller sizes in order to allow more video to be stored in the same storage capacity. [2]

FLV (Flash Video)

Flash Video (FLV) is video encoded by Adobe Flash software in order to play within the Adobe Flash Player. Popular in the past, and used by several video sites, including YouTube, the Adobe Flash Player has been replaced by HTML5 and this format has been abandoned.

MPEG-4 Part 14 (MP4)

MPEG-4 is known as a sharing format for the internet. In recent years an increasing number of camcorder and cameras began employ it. Moreover, YouTube recommends using the MP4 Format (Although it accepts multiple formats, YouTube either converts them to .flv or .mp4 files). Apple is another company that has backed MP4 by using it in its QuickTime player. [3]

YouTube

YouTube was founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. The first video on the platform was "Me at the zoo" uploaded by Karim on the first YouTube channel, jawed, in April 2005.

In October 2005, Nike became the first major company to embrace YouTube as a promotional platform. They were the first company to do this and since then YouTube has provided a means of displaying internet video in order to help companies promote their products. Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion in October 2006 and since then it has developed it even further. [4] Since then, it has become the most popular website for watching internet video. For example, the hours of video watched per month on YouTube totaled 6 billion. [5] As of 2014, there were one billion unique users to YouTube each month. According to Nielsen, YouTube reaches more U.S. adults aged 18–34 years old than any cable network. [6]

Other video platforms

Aside from YouTube, there are several other internet video platforms, which despite being less popular, are still used by many.

Live streaming

Live streaming is another important aspect of internet video. This is when particular events are streamed using a live form of internet video. A key example of this is that in 2008 and 2012, during the presidential election, the debates between the two candidates were live-streamed on YouTube.

Live streaming has also been used as a means of promoting exposure for a particular product or business. This is largely because platforms such as YouTube provide a cheap, and usually free, means to access millions of users. Whether that be potential customers on laptops, smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs. A study conducted by SocialMediaExaminer supports this hypothesis using YouTube as a particular example. [7]

A sign of the growth of importance of internet video live streaming refers to the change in business model of the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). [8] Previously the WWE's business model involved receiving huge numbers of pay-per-view buys for special events hosted once per month and charging approx. $44.95 (Dependent on retailer) for each. [9] However, in February 2014 they launched a 24/7 streaming network charging $9.99 per month in order to get access to every "special event". This shows that one of the largest entertainment companies was willing to adopt to a live streaming/internet video model in order to support their business. Many other companies such as BBC (with iPlayer), ITV (with ITV Player) and Channel 4 (with 4oD) have made use of internet video to allow users to livestream content, or watch on demand later.

Controversy

Both live streaming and internet videos have faced controversy in recent years, largely because it is extremely difficult to access all the live-streams which show particular events. This infringes on the issue of copyright. Rights-holders face the challenge of content, which includes audio, TV shows and sporting events, being streamed live to the public. [10] As a result, streaming website Justin.TV partnered with content matching service Vobile in order to filter out infringing material. [11] [12] Another example of a copyright issue which occurred to online streaming was when uStream were sued by a boxing promoter in August 2009 for allowing 2,337 users to view a broadcast of the fight Roy Jones Jr. vs Omar Sheika. [13]

YouTube has also faced issues surrounding copyright. For example, in December 2013, [14] many YouTubers who published footage of video games for either review or tutorial purposes were punished and crippled by copyright claims. In the past, YouTube has also faced issues with the music industry over users publishing videos without the permission of the music industry. The issues can be seen by the fact that since 2007, YouTube has paid out one billion dollars to copyright holders. [15] Saying that, the formation of Vevo has aided YouTube in terms of issues with the music industry by allowing artists/labels to get a share of revenue.

The importance of video in the music industry

The growth of internet video has provided a platform to help elevate the music industry. This has most particularly been seen through the platform of YouTube. Chris Maxcy, YouTube's partner development director stated that “YouTube is the ideal place for labels to promote music and for fans to discover new artists and old favourites”. Moreover, Rio Caraeff, who heads up Universal's digital group described YouTube as a “revenue stream, a commercial business. It's growing tremendously. It's up almost 80 percent for us year-over-year in the U.S. in terms of our revenue from this category”. [16] In addition, an article published in 2011, [17] believes that YouTube has changed the music industry citing three ways; YouTube allows people to listen to the native music of India, for example, and other regions which would otherwise be difficult to discover. Brittany Wong also believes that YouTube allows people to get discovered. This is largely because it allows anybody to post an online video for the world to see. Finally, it mentions that the convenience of the platform allows many people to listen to music, which has increased potential audiences.

Mike Masnik, the CEO and founder of Techdirt, recognized the importance of YouTube in the music industry. [18] In this article he recognizes the potential ability of YouTube in order to allow musicians to increase exposure, and record labels to make money. However, they were naïve and did not fully embrace it.

See also

Related Research Articles

QuickTime is a discontinued extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats. The term QuickTime also refers to the QuickTime Player front-end media player application, which is built-into macOS, and was formerly available for Windows.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Streaming media</span> Multimedia delivery method

Streaming media refers to multimedia for playback using an offline or online media player that is delivered through a network. Media is transferred in a "stream" of packets from a server to a client and is rendered in real-time; this contrasts with file downloading, a process in which the end-user obtains an entire media file before consuming the content. Streaming is presently most prevalent in video-on-demand, streaming television, and music streaming services over the Internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VLC media player</span> Free and open-source media-player and streaming-media-server

VLC media player is a free and open-source, portable, cross-platform media player software and streaming media server developed by the VideoLAN project. VLC is available for desktop operating systems and mobile platforms, such as Android, iOS and iPadOS. VLC is also available on digital distribution platforms such as Apple's App Store, Google Play, and Microsoft Store.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Video</span> Free video hosting service from Google

Google Video was a free video hosting service, originally launched by Google on January 25, 2005.

A container format or metafile is a file format that allows multiple data streams to be embedded into a single file, usually along with metadata for identifying and further detailing those streams. Notable examples of container formats include archive files and formats used for multimedia playback. Among the earliest cross-platform container formats were Distinguished Encoding Rules and the 1985 Interchange File Format.

These tables compare features of multimedia container formats, most often used for storing or streaming digital video or digital audio content. To see which multimedia players support which container format, look at comparison of media players.

Flash Video is a container file format used to deliver digital video content over the Internet using Adobe Flash Player version 6 and newer. Flash Video content may also be embedded within SWF files. There are two different Flash Video file formats: FLV and F4V. The audio and video data within FLV files are encoded in the same way as SWF files. The F4V file format is based on the ISO base media file format, starting with Flash Player 9 update 3. Both formats are supported in Adobe Flash Player and developed by Adobe Systems. FLV was originally developed by Macromedia. In the early 2000s, Flash Video was the de facto standard for web-based streaming video. Users include Hulu, VEVO, Yahoo! Video, metacafe, Reuters.com, and many other news providers.

The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of current, notable video hosting services. Please see the individual products' articles for further information.

AVCHD is a file-based format for the digital recording and playback of high-definition video. It is H.264 and Dolby AC-3 packaged into the MPEG transport stream, with a set of constraints designed around camcorders.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">KMPlayer</span> Freeware media player for Microsoft Windows

K-Multimedia Player is an Adware-supported media player for Windows, android and iOS that can play most current audio and video formats, including VCD, DVD, AVI, MP4, MPG, DAT, OGM, VOB, MKV, Ogg, OGM, 3GP, MPEG-1/2/4, AAC, WMA 7/8, WMV, RealMedia, FLV, and QuickTime.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MP4 file format</span> Digital format for storing video and audio

MPEG-4 Part 14, or MP4, is a digital multimedia container format most commonly used to store video and audio, but it can also be used to store other data such as subtitles and still images. Like most modern container formats, it allows streaming over the Internet. The only filename extension for MPEG-4 Part 14 files as defined by the specification is .mp4. MPEG-4 Part 14 is a standard specified as a part of MPEG-4.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GPAC Project on Advanced Content</span>

GPAC Project on Advanced Content is an open-source multimedia framework focused on modularity and standards compliance. GPAC was created as an implementation of the MPEG-4 Systems standard written in ANSI C and later extended in Streaming Media. GPAC provides tools to process, inspect, package, stream, media playback and interact with media content. Such content can be any combination of audio, video, subtitles, metadata, encrypted media, rendering and ECMAScript.

A demultiplexer for digital media files, or media demultiplexer, also called a file splitter by laymen or consumer software providers, is software that demultiplexes individual elementary streams of a media file, e.g., audio, video, or subtitles and sends them to their respective decoders for actual decoding. Media demultiplexers are not decoders themselves, but are format container handlers that separate media streams from a (container) file and supply them to their respective audio, video, or subtitles decoders.

HTTP Live Streaming is an HTTP-based adaptive bitrate streaming communications protocol developed by Apple Inc. and released in 2009. Support for the protocol is widespread in media players, web browsers, mobile devices, and streaming media servers. As of 2022, an annual video industry survey has consistently found it to be the most popular streaming format.

RTMPDump is a free software project dedicated to developing a toolkit for RTMP streams. The package includes three programs, rtmpdump, rtmpsrv and rtmpsuck.

The Helix Universal Media Server was a product developed by RealNetworks and originates from the first streaming media server originally developed by Progressive Networks in 1994. It supported a variety of streaming media delivery transports including MPEG-DASH RTMP (flash), RTSP (standard), HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), Microsoft Silverlight and HTTP Progressive Download enabling mobile phone OS and PC OS media client delivery.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free Studio</span> Software application

Free Studio is a freeware set of multimedia programs developed by DVDVideoSoft. The programs are available in one integrated package and also as separate downloads.

Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), also known as MPEG-DASH, is an adaptive bitrate streaming technique that enables high quality streaming of media content over the Internet delivered from conventional HTTP web servers. Similar to Apple's HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) solution, MPEG-DASH works by breaking the content into a sequence of small segments, which are served over HTTP. An early HTTP web server based streaming system called SProxy was developed and deployed in the Hewlett Packard Laboratories in 2006. It showed how to use HTTP range requests to break the content into small segments. SProxy shows the effectiveness of segment based streaming, gaining best Internet penetration due to the wide deployment of firewalls, and reducing the unnecessary traffic transmission if a user chooses to terminate the streaming session earlier before reaching the end. Each segment contains a short interval of playback time of content that is potentially many hours in duration, such as a movie or the live broadcast of a sport event. The content is made available at a variety of different bit rates, i.e., alternative segments encoded at different bit rates covering aligned short intervals of playback time. While the content is being played back by an MPEG-DASH client, the client uses a bit rate adaptation (ABR) algorithm to automatically select the segment with the highest bit rate possible that can be downloaded in time for playback without causing stalls or re-buffering events in the playback. The current MPEG-DASH reference client dash.js offers both buffer-based (BOLA) and hybrid (DYNAMIC) bit rate adaptation algorithms. Thus, an MPEG-DASH client can seamlessly adapt to changing network conditions and provide high quality playback with few stalls or re-buffering events.

The PlayStation Vita system software is the official firmware and operating system for the PlayStation Vita and PlayStation TV video game consoles. It uses the LiveArea as its graphical shell. The system is built on a Unix-base which is derived from FreeBSD and NetBSD.

An online video platform (OVP) enables users to upload, convert, store, and play back video content on the Internet, often via a private server structured, large-scale system that may generate revenue. Users will generally upload video content via the hosting service's website, mobile or desktop application, or other interfaces (API), and typically provides embed codes or links that allow others to view the video content.

References

  1. ↑ Lee, Jack (2005). Scalable Continuous Media Streaming Systems: Architecture, Design, Analysis and Implementation. John Wiley & Sons. p. 25. ISBN   9780470857649.
  2. ↑ Montgomery, Mark (November 2009). "If You're Looking For More Info About The AVCHD Codec". videomaker.com. Archived from the original on 21 October 2014. Retrieved 22 October 2014.
  3. ↑ "The MPEG-4 Format". mediacollege.com. Archived from the original on 13 April 2015. Retrieved 22 October 2014.
  4. ↑ Lidsky, David. "The Brief But Impactful History of YouTube". fastcompany.com. Archived from the original on 22 February 2014. Retrieved 22 October 2014.
  5. ↑ Smith, Craig. "By The Numbers: 60 Amazing YouTube Statistics". expandedramblings.com. Archived from the original on 17 October 2014. Retrieved 22 October 2014.
  6. ↑ "Statistics". YouTube.com. Archived from the original on 20 October 2014. Retrieved 22 October 2014.
  7. ↑ Colligan, Paul. "How to Use YouTube Live Streaming to Boost Your Exposure". Social Media Examiner. Archived from the original on 21 October 2014. Retrieved 22 October 2014.
  8. ↑ VanDerWerff, Emily (August 2014). "Why don't we have a standalone HBO Go? Look to the WWE Network for an answer". vox.com. Archived from the original on 21 October 2014. Retrieved 22 October 2014.
  9. ↑ "Events/TV/PPV". WWE.com. Archived from the original on 22 November 2014. Retrieved 22 October 2014.
  10. ↑ Bailey, Jonathan (24 August 2009). "Livestreaming and Copyright Issues". theblogherald.com. Archived from the original on 13 October 2014. Retrieved 22 October 2014.
  11. ↑ Albrecht, Chris. "Justin.tv Placates Copyright Holders With Anti-piracy Tech". gigaom.com. Archived from the original on 10 March 2015. Retrieved 22 October 2014.
  12. ↑ "watch free movies online". Archived from the original on 10 April 2023. Retrieved 10 April 2023.
  13. ↑ Kincaid, Jason (17 August 2009). "Ustream Sued By Boxing Promoter Over Pirated Broadcast". techcrunch.com. Archived from the original on 5 November 2014. Retrieved 22 October 2014.
  14. ↑ Totilo, Stephen (11 December 2013). "YouTube Channels Crippled By Copyright Claims". kotaku.com. Archived from the original on 22 October 2014. Retrieved 22 October 2014.
  15. ↑ Wagstaff, Keith. "YouTube Has Paid $1 Billion to Copyright Holders Since 2007". NBCNews.com. Archived from the original on 22 October 2014. Retrieved 22 October 2014.
  16. ↑ Sandoval, Greg. "Universal Music seeing 'tens of millions' from YouTube". cnet.com. Archived from the original on 21 October 2014. Retrieved 22 October 2014.
  17. ↑ Wong, Brittany (14 November 2011). "Three Ways YouTube Has Changed the Music Industry". group3info.blogspot.com. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 22 October 2014.
  18. ↑ Masnick, Mike. "How the record labels spurned the YouTube opportunity" . Telegraph.co.uk. Archived from the original on 2022-01-12. Retrieved 22 October 2014.
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