ABC Launches Full Episode Streaming

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.

US only

[Mishotaki]

damned... only viewers from the United States can watch those episodes :(

Damn

[Tx]

"Only viewers within the United States can watch these full length episodes."

Or anyone with a list of US-based proxies, heh.

Any predictions...

[DaHat]

As to when someone will whip out an app to record these streams (perhaps even under Linux)?

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.

Quality

[sehryan]

"The quality is approximately what you would expect from flash video."

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.

Unrated Editions?

[Shadow Wrought]

I'm sure many of you have noticed that movies now get edited down to PG-13 ratings for theatres and then get bumped back to R levels on the unrated DVD releases. I wonder how long it will be before a network (Fox?) does the same thing. See our shows free on TV, or pay a little for the streaming unrated version of American Dad. Or, better yet, Trippin' the Rift.

Monster bandwidth or network voodoo?

[Weaselmancer]

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:Actually pretty smart..

[temojen]

Put up a torrent of the shows in HD, and I'd wager most people wouldn't bother cutting out the commercials.

interactive ads

[athena_wiles]

Hm. Nobody's mentioned this yet, but the flash format enables them to put interactive ads into the episodes. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm much more likely to respond to an ad if I can click on things & choose what extra information I want instead of having an ad lecture at me... When things are interactive I find I invariably spend more time playing with them, too :-)

Think this could make a difference in the overall effectiveness of their ads? Just curious...

Re:Flash 8

[Aqua OS X]

I wouldn't be surprised to see a Linux player with the next release of Flash. Adobe releases linux / unix versions of Acrobat reader, they might do something similar for Flash player.

Re:Monster bandwidth or network voodoo?

[iammaxus]

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.

Re:Quality

[assassinator42]

Well, it's probably in comparison to other flash video sites. Well, it would be, except this is better. When trying to switch to their "full screen" version, it warns me that I don't have an 850 kbps connection. (I was using download gandwidth elsewhere.) By the way, the "fullscreen" option just makes the video a bit bigger, and presumably higher quality. This isn't even like Google Video's "fullscreen" option, which stretches to window size. The size is fixed either way. That's the thing I hate about flash videos, when they're embedded in a browser at least: the inability to truely make the video fullscreen. I have the same complaint about Quicktime.

Re:Monster bandwidth or network voodoo?

[ameoba]

They probably use something like Akamai [akamai.com]'s network of distributed content servers. I'm fuzzy on the exact details but they basically set up caches/mirrors at 'edge' points of the network and use DNS voodoo to make sure you connect to the 'closest' server, transparent to the end user.

Re:US only

[x2A]

Doesn't this fall under unauthorised access of a computer system? Personally I'd prefer "pirate" than "hacker" whenever possible.

Re:Quality

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Flash 8 video is in fact a modified version of On2 technology's VP6 encoder. You may know about On2 because their previous-generation VP3 encoder was "donated" to the open-source community and became what we now know as Ogg Theora.

VP6 is roghly on par with Windows Media 9, H.264, or XVID - definitely a step above MPEG2 or other older codecs.

Re:Flash Video Quality

[badasscat]

The summary could have at least mentioned the codec used or the bit rate.

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.

Re:Flash Video Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't you estimate the bit rate by keeping track of how much is transferred to your computer over a known period of time playing the stream (and not use your network for anything else during that time)?

this is better

[indian_devil]

than the rabbit ears on sunday night in New Haven, CT seriously.. i dont want cable ( i live rarely at my place ) and only free channels over air s**k like crazy... this is much better I hope sponsors keep paying ;-)