Stephen, thanks for the follow-up. Flash is a GREAT format for video and audio. We've standardized on Flash for all our video distribution. Their "progressive" video streaming is a nice hybrid which as you probably know, is a nice intro to streaming with the overhead of a high-end streaming server. Great for smaller numbers of streams.
Another nice option when considering unknown bandwidth for your target audience is to have a streaming version of the video (.FLV) and then offer downloadable version like .WMV for Windows and .M4V for Mac/iPod. Download allows the user to playback locally without having to worry about bandwidth. If you offer these as downloadable, make sure that you set the custom HTTP headers as "Content-disposition: attachment". This way, it will prompt the browser to download rather than launch your browser's registered version of a player utility.
|