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ABC Launches Full Episode Streaming
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon May 01, 2006 03:47 PM
from the well-thats-something-anyway dept.
from the well-thats-something-anyway dept.
Cjattwood writes "ABC.com has launched their free online episode streaming service earlier today. Shows available include Lost and Alias among others, and are available to watch for free, albeit with ads and commercials. It works pretty well so far, although no Linux support yet as it requires Flash 8." The first episode of Lost on there is a clip show. You can skip around to a segment of the show, but are forced through a commercial before you play. The quality is approximately what you would expect from flash video.
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Flash 8 (Score:4, Insightful)
Not v8.0, v8.5... (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Flash 8 (Score:3)
Re:Flash 8 (Score:3, Interesting)
Flash Video Quality (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Flash Video Quality (Score:4, Interesting)
The codec is Flash video. It's Macromedia's/Adobe's own codec.
The bit rate is unknowable unless ABC says what it is in a press release or elsewhere on the site. Maybe you could figure out a way to save one of these flv files and open it in a standalone player that'd tell you the bit rate. My guess is ABC is smart enough to have locked out that ability, though.
"Flash Video Quality" is still basically meaningless, because Flash video can have whatever quality you give it. You can encode Flash video in HD if you want to; it'd be pretty pointless to do so because the whole point of Flash video is to stream, but you could do it if you wanted to.
But omitting the codec or bit rate from the summary aren't really oversights - the codec is a given, the bit rate is just unknown.
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US only (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:US only (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:US only (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:US only (Score:3, Interesting)
Only visitors in the US (Score:3, Informative)
Damn (Score:5, Interesting)
Or anyone with a list of US-based proxies, heh.
With ad's? (Score:3, Insightful)
Any predictions... (Score:3, Interesting)
Shame they are so low res though... no doubt many will continue to use illicit means to see the shows in a much higher res.
Already been done... (Score:4, Insightful)
BetaMAX
VCR
TiVO
DVR
MythTV
BeyondTV
...
GBPVR
These are free shows that are broadcast throughout the world unencrypted, why would you want to record the Flash version? This is getting ridiculous. Only on slashdot do you read about people who steal free shit.
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United States Only (Score:3, Informative)
Quality (Score:5, Interesting)
I am assuming this is a putdown on Flash video, being Slashdot and all. The ABC site is dragging ass, so I can't actually see the quality for myself. That being said...
Flash video can encode as high a quality as any other encoder. Some of the stuff I have seen looks better than other encoders, and always results in amazingly small file size. Just this morning, I saw a 4 minute, 720x480 AVI go from 890MB to 15MB with virtually no loss in quality.
If the quality is poor, blame the developer, not the tool.
Re:Quality (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Quality (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Quality (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Quality (Score:3, Informative)
Other codecs can produce better if not as good quality at the same file sizes.
Sorenson, (I'm not kidding)
3ivx for creating platform independent MP4
Apple's H.264
And MPEG1 - for the size that the Flash movies were encoded
Some of the above codecs are also VBR where you set your desired quality level and each frame is only as big as it needs to be. But alas, Flash is on most browsers. What I haven't seen are DVD sized flash videos or any of
Re:Quality (Score:3, Interesting)
VP6 is roghly on par with Windows Media 9, H.264, or XVID - definitely a step above MPEG2 or other older codecs.
Unrated Editions? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Unrated Editions? (Score:5, Funny)
I see I'm not the only one who wants some hot neked triple-boobed T'nuk action!
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Re:Unrated Editions? (Score:5, Funny)
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Only for U.S. and notes... (Score:3, Informative)
Don't forget to leave feedbacks [go.com] for ABC on this project! Let them know what you think of it! It is also missing two of my other TV shows (Invasion [go.com] and Grey's Anatomy [go.com]). So, I left a request and a positive comment for ABC via its feedback.
I wonder if there is a way to set the Flash video to fullscreen onto my TV as a video overlay? I do this with Windows' Media Players, VideoLAN Client Media Player [videolan.org], DVD players, etc. I don't have to set the players to fullscreen, just the video out.
Re:Only for U.S. and notes... (Score:5, Informative)
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Now all they need... (Score:5, Funny)
If you're a geek... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:If you're a geek... (Score:3, Funny)
Apple iTunes store lawsuit? (Score:4, Funny)
Didn't Apple make a big deal about offering episodes of Lost on their iTunes Video/Music store?
I can't imagine they will be very happy with ABC direct-releasing similarly-poor-quality videos for free. I smell another frivolous lawsuit...
Re:Apple iTunes store lawsuit? (Score:4, Insightful)
The versions on iTMS are pay once, own forever (not streaming).
The versions on iTMS are ad free.
For $1.99, I'd rather get Lost on iTMS and pipe it to my TV from my iPod.
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Monster bandwidth or network voodoo? (Score:5, Interesting)
ABC.com has launched their free online episode streaming service earlier today. Shows available include Lost and Alias among others, and are available to watch for free, albeit with ad's and commercials.
I've always wondered about sites like this, or YouTube, or Google Video, or any of the other seriously massive media streaming sites.
How the hell do they do it?
Seems to me like you'd have to have Bandwidth Of The Gods(tm) in order to pull it off. Multicast isn't really working on the internet proper. So how the hell does a site like this manage it? If you have thousands upon thousands of people hooking up...a lot of them at cablemodem speeds, how does the pipe deliver?
I know that these sites do, in fact have massive bandwidth. But it just seems to me that hundreds of thousands of people wanting hours of video thorough mutliple unicast would be enough to choke pretty much anything that's not on Internet2.
How the hell do they manage it? Is there some sort of Voodoo that I'm missing?
Re:Monster bandwidth or network voodoo? (Score:5, Interesting)
The answer is probably that it just isn't as it seems. Even using some big numbers and assumptions, its not as bad as it seems. If the site sends 10 million users 50 MB of data each and spreads it out over a whole day, it comes to about 5.5 GBps continuously. Taking a look at this map [nthelp.com], there are plenty of cities that offer that kind of bandwidth, and this is only one network (admittedly, the largest), and of course, the servers could (and almost certainly are) spread out over several locations. Further, the number of servers required is not great considering it is not unreasonable for a high end server to achieve 100's of MBps when serving static data like this. Of course, all these numbers are probably pretty far off (in reality, I'm sure the number of servers required scales terribly as you start to spend a lot of resources on load balancing and the fact that some sites serve huge libraries of content), but my point is that it is certainly reasonable.
That said, you do still bring up an interesting issue: even though these sites are certainly technically feasible, they are certainly extremely expensive (Go ask Worldcom how much they'd like to buy all of there connections to Los Angeles...). Unless we are reentering dot com days, Google, YouTube and there ilk must be expecting to make some serious ROI soon.
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Re:Monster bandwidth or network voodoo? (Score:5, Informative)
Additionally, you are assuming that people would all watch at discreet intervals without overlapping too much and that nobody else would be using the Internet for any other purpose. In reality, there will already be a high traffic load and people will want the video in clumps. It is why people like Apple are offering downloadable video and not streaming. That way if it takes 2 hours to download a 1 hour show, at least you didn't have to sit through all of the pauses
Finally, a 45 minute show off of iTunes currently runs about 200MB at about 670Kbps. That 10Gb pipe would max out at far fewer than 20,000 streams.
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Re:Monster bandwidth or network voodoo? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Monster bandwidth or network voodoo? (Score:3, Informative)
US only (Score:5, Funny)
I'm being discriminated against, just because I'm in a different country! That's geographicist, that is! Can I sue?
Flash the new video standard (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not surpised at all (Score:5, Insightful)
For ten years MS, Apple and Real have been fighting to make their proprietary streaming solutions the default for the internet. They have failed and I'm glad.
I'm no fan of Flash, but I'm sick to death of having to have all three of these media players installed. I'm sick of having to update them all time. I'm sick of browser plugins that don't work. I'm sick of content that will only work with WMP on Windows. I'm sick of having to "choose a player" when I visit a site, asking my connection speed, asking me to register for premium content and on and on.
And I'm not alone. You're average user doesn't want to and often doesn't know how to download, update and install this stuff. They don't know what number to type when it asks them about connection speed. Content providers are sick of it, too. They are inundated with constant complaints and support emails from people who can't see the video. So, the said "screw you Apple, screw you MS, screw you Real, were gonna use Flash".
And the kids love it. They type "YouTube" into Yahoo search and click the Play button on their favorite video. No fuss. No muss. Nothing to download. Instant gratification. The kids don't give two shits about the quality. It's simple and it works.
That's why Flash is the new standard in video streaming.
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Re:Flash the new video standard (Score:3, Informative)
CmdrTaco Or Captain Obvious? (Score:5, Informative)
"it requires Flash 8"
Cmdr Taco's value-add comment:
"The quality is approximately what you would expect from flash video."
It's actually exactly what you'd expect from Flash video, because it is Flash video. That being said, what quality would you expect? I bet it differs quite a bit based on the datarate you encode it at... Perhaps he's saying it's similar in quality to YouTube or Google Video? (We only give you a hard time because we imagine that you have one of the best jobs in the world, so don't take it personally, Taco.)
For people asking about Linux versions of Flash 8 - they've had a separate team working on Flash 9 for quite a while and it's set to be released later this year (it includes significant changes for performance improvement, was in development to some extent in parallel with Flash 8) - and from what I understand as a casual obsverver they're going to release a Flash 9 player for Linux and just skip 8 entirely. This is in part because it's only relativly recently that they've added dedicated Linux staff, and in part beacuse this is the fastest switch between versions (8 to 9) that I can recall, anyway.
The hope is that Linux release will be simultaneous with the Mac/Windows launch, but I don't know if anyone's commited to that yet - or if it's just idle hope.
interactive ads (Score:5, Interesting)
Think this could make a difference in the overall effectiveness of their ads? Just curious...
repetitive bullshit advertising (Score:5, Funny)
then all those god damn pharma-ads with warnings about the side-effects that cause erectile dysfunction/bladder control issues/possibility of stroke and heart attack.. nursing mothers shouldn't inhale this stuff/etc etc
TV is a fucking mess lol.
Try this for a commercial you network bitches, I might even watch it.
"Hi, I'm Jake and I'd like you to try our new shampoo. it works well and controls dandruff" -> camera closeup on shampoo bottle.
End of commercial. thank you very fucking much.
Doh! (Score:3, Funny)
Quality (Score:3, Informative)
That's actually very misleading. Flash 8 includes a new codec which is considered among the best for online video streaming (and video in general): On2's VP6. It's a fully featured decoder also with deringing, deblocking and so on filters that enhance the quality of the decoded image.
If the quality is crappy it was a deliberate choice of ABC to keep the bitrate low for whatever reasons, or using bad encoders (which I doubt, but how can I know).
If there's one thing, Flash doesn't have a native full screen mode, which for a streaming TV show is kinda a bummer...
Ads *and* commercials? (Score:3, Funny)
here's how they handle the ads (Score:3, Insightful)
The blue stripes on the progress bar tell you where the commercials are. The others are at 15:25, 24:15 (in a 43 minute program, and you aren't goosed with another one at the end!). You can seek anywhere that's been "unlocked."
Having to click "resume show" after every commercial is a feature I'd like to see "LOST." By clicking in unlocked sections, you can watch all 3 commercials in succession , then have an uninterrupted show.
You aren't forced to sit through more than 30 seconds of an ad if it runs over.
Compared to the 7-min-on, 3-off network standard, it's kind of pleasant. And seeking *works*, seamlessly, in contrast to what I've come to expect with flash video.
Re:here's how they handle the ads (Score:3, Informative)
For hour long network shows, the commercial segments are 3:30 on the quarter hours and 4:30 on the half hour nowadays. You also get a 3:30 after the bumper. Pad all of those with 5-seconds of "Stay tuned for news at 9!" The remaining ~3:00 minutes gets you previews, network notifications (Stay tuned for a new Episode of FOOBAR!) and between-show commercials.
A few shows have some liberties with this. The Sheild, which in first ru
Re:Actually pretty smart.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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