About Streaming

Web streaming is a way of making multimedia content available to users in a continuous "stream" over the Internet. Instead of downloading a file, users view or hear multimedia stored on a server. After a brief period of initializing and buffering, the file will begin to stream — or play — in real time.

Examples of how you can use DukeStream:

A supplementary lecture for a class
A student video about the freshman experience at Duke
Online exercises for students
A guest speaker
A promotional video
A demonstration

Advantages of streaming vs. downloadable files

  • Instant playback: Streaming media clips begin to play almost as soon as a viewer clicks on a link. A few seconds of buffering time is usually required as the server retrieves initial data (new technologies like Apple's Instant-On are eliminating even those short waits). Additionally, with streaming a viewer has instant access to all portions of a clip, even the very end. In a download scenario, you would have to wait until that portion of the clip had been downloaded to view it.
  • Quality of service: Streaming servers optimize delivery for clips based on their data rates and other encoding settings and are able to reconnect automatically if a client-server connection breaks. More importantly, streaming servers use network resources intelligently, allowing multiple users to share available bandwidth. By contrast, downloading creates a network free-for-all where bandwidth is allocated simply on a first come, first served basis. This means that when load is high, many users will be unable to view files or will experience long waits.
  • Playlists: Most streaming servers allow you to create server-side playlists, lists of files that can stream one right after the other. A common application of this is to stream a pre-roll – a short sequence that brands your group or project – followed by the clip itself, and then a credit sequence at the end, which means that you wouldn't have to manually edit those elements into each clip you create.
  • Long-form media: Expecting viewers to access long events such as lectures, feature films or archived conference proceedings via download may be unreasonable given that such files are often hundreds of megabytes or more. Streaming makes delivering such content user-friendly.
  • Live events: Streaming is the only way to distribute live events over the Web.
  • Copyright protection #1: Streaming media players throw away data packets after playback, which means clips never reside in their entirety on a local machine. Users therefore don't have the ability to redistribute or repurpose content as they can with downloaded media.
  • Copyright protection #2: Streaming media servers have their own built-in authentication systems, allowing you to control who can and cannot view your clips.

Should I ever consider making clips available via plain old download?

If you are delivering a few short clips over a fast network such as Duke's, are unconcerned about the issues listed above, and are expecting a small number of users to be viewing your files simultaneously, download might be a quick-and-dirty way to distribute your files.

For more information on streaming vs. download, take a look at at Microsoft's comparison of these options on the Windows Media Site for Pros.