Again, it’s not surprising to learn that broadband is moving from “the thing that brings you websites and email” to “the thing that brings you video.” But change over time drives it home: Sandvine says that five years ago, video/audio represented 35 percent of prime-time usage. Now it has doubled, to 70 percent.
Source: Streaming Video Is 70 Percent of Broadband Use – Sandvine | Re/code
The top 1 percent of bands and solo artists now earn about 80 percent of all revenue from recorded music, as I wrote in “The Shazam Effect.” But the market for streamed music is not so concentrated. The ten most-popular songs accounted for just shy of 2 percent of all streams in 2013 and 2014.
via Digital music sales on iTunes and beyond are now fading as fast as CDs. – The Atlantic.
MediaGoblin is a free software media publishing platform that anyone can run. You can think of it as a decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc. It’s also:
- The perfect tool to show and share your media!
- Building tools to empower the world through decentralization!
- Built for extensibility. Multiple media types, including video support!
via MediaGoblin.
“Consider any file-hosting service that allows people to store their own material, such as Dropbox. What if it can be shown they are storing copyrighted work. Do they need a license?” he asked in a telephone interview.
Mitch Stoltz, an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney, said in a telephone interview that, “If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the broadcasters, their opinion might create liability for various types of cloud computing, especially cloud storage.”
via Aereo analysis: Cloud computing at a crossroads | Ars Technica.
If the idea of a networked security camera that you can remotely view and receive alerts from appeals to you but the $$$ of a commercial model does not, read on as we show you how to turn older generation Android phones into sophisticated security cameras.
via How to Turn An Old Android Phone into a Networked Security Camera.
The industry has been divided on the choice of a common video codec for some time, namely because the industry standard–H.264–requires royalty payments to MPEG LA. Today, I am pleased to announce Cisco is making a bold move to take concerns about these payments off the table.
We plan to open-source our H.264 codec, and to provide it as a binary module that can be downloaded for free from the Internet. Cisco will not pass on our MPEG LA licensing costs for this module, and based on the current licensing environment, this will effectively make H.264 free for use in WebRTC.
For quite some time I just resigned myself to the fact that I’d have to boot into windows or use some other poor method to get my netflix on… then Erich Hoover arrived with a heroic flast to his eye, chin thrust forward and proclaimed, “Do not go gentle into that sudo shutdown -r now! Rage, rage against the needlessness of these cursed reboots!
Here is how to install the Netflix Desktop App on Ubuntu. Open a terminal and run these commands:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ehoover/compholio
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install netflix-desktop
More info here: http://www.iheartubuntu.com/2012/11/ppa-for-netflix-desktop-app.html [iheartubuntu.com]
via Ask Slashdot: Linux Friendly Video Streaming? – Slashdot.
Xboxes, iPads, connected TVs: Netflix streams to a lot of different devices. More than 900, to be precise. And many of them have different screen sizes, bitrate requirements and codec support. That’s why Netflix is doing a whole lot of encoding: Each and every movie is encoded in 120 different versions, according to a behind-the-scenes video recently published by the company.
via To stream everywhere, Netflix encodes each movie 120 times — Online Video News.
The download feature, which lets Comcast adopt an iTunes-ish model without the incremental pay-per-view component (for now), is a nice add-on because it lets users watch shows and movies on planes and in other venues that usually don’t have a solid enough broadband connection for streaming.
via Light Reading Cable – The Bauminator – Who’s Behind Comcast’s Video Downloader?.
The problem with ABR is that the client device, such as a smartphone or tablet, is in charge of the bandwidth and isn’t fair about how that capacity is allocated. If an iPhone is the first device on the home network to request a video stream, it will typically receive a high bit-rate version — perhaps more than it really needs. Then, when a connected HD television requests a stream, it tends to get the scraps, resulting in a crummy-looking pixel-icious image.
Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC) is trying to solve the problem by applying Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ), a data packet scheduling technique, to ABR streams.
From Wikipedia on WFQ:
WFQ is a generalization of fair queuing (FQ). Both in WFQ and FQ, each data flow has a separate FIFO queue. In FQ, with a link data rate of
, at any given time the
active data flows (the ones with non-empty queues) are serviced simultaneously, each at an average data rate of
. Since each data flow has its own queue, an ill-behaved flow (who has sent larger packets or more packets per second than the others since it became active) will only punish itself and not other sessions.
As opposed to FQ, WFQ allows different sessions to have different service shares. If
data flow number
will achieve an average data rate of
It can be proven [1] that when using a network with WFQ switches and a data flow that is leaky bucket constrained, an end-to-end delay bound can be guaranteed. By regulating the WFQ weights dynamically, WFQ can be utilized for controlling the quality of service, for example to achieve guaranteed data rate.
