

Apple launches HTTP live streaming in iPhone 3.0 - e1ven
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/07/08/apple_launches_http_live_streaming_standard_in_iphone_3_0.html

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blasdel
There are only two reasons to do actual streaming of any content:

    
    
      A) You're broadcasting a live event
      B) You want to pretend the user can't save the content
    

In all other cases, the "sort of fake streaming called HTTP Progressive
Download" is massively superior.

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drawkbox
One other small factor is cost. Lots of places go with streaming for cost,
either to limit the amount of unnecessary download or to add in ads to pay for
it (or limit streaming just to their site initially). For instance a live
event especially where you want to make sure availability is the best
situation it can be. Also for larger movie files such as maybe on Netflix
streaming is more cost efficient as lots of people stop watching or partially
watch. No need to download everything at .10 a GB for unwatched content.

Either way it sucks but it lives on due to market demands.

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DarkShikari
You can limit unnecessary download with progressive with two combined tools:

1\. Bandwidth throttling.

2\. MP4 seeking support (usually a server plugin, e.g. mod_h264_streaming or
whatever).

This way you can use progressive download and still limit the user to a sane
download speed.

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drawkbox
Good points. Throttling works well with a good infrastructure and haven't used
seeking support but will look into it. Seems like there is overhead with
streaming and seeking but maybe throttling is the way to go. Still you'd need
to be able dynamically adjust it to the users connection and the data rate of
the video, that is kinda what is nice about streaming which is on top.

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shib71
Can someone explain the phrase "the obsolete Ogg Theora" thrown in at the end?
Throw-away trollbait or valid argument?

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blasdel
Up until a year ago, Theora was total dogshit, dramatically worse than H.263
(RealVideo, Flash 7, etc.) -- Xiph had made basically no effort at all to
improve the codec itself, they just made a lot of fuss about integrating it
with their custom container format, and froze the format in 2004 (Not that it
really mattered -- there have never been other implementations).

A year ago, the 'Thusnelda' development fork of the encoder was started, and
made dramatic quality improvements -- the bleeding-edge library now achieves
about the same level of mediocrity as H.263 -- welcome to the early 90s!

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doublec
I believe the "there have never been other implementations" to be incorrect.
The Cortado Java Applet is a a second implementation of the Theora code for
example.

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blasdel
That's just a decoder, and it's a directly derived work of libtheora, not
independently written or divergent.

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stillmotion
Friend of mine has been using this protocol for the last couple weeks:
[http://cultofmac.com/church-puts-faith-in-iphone-
streaming-t...](http://cultofmac.com/church-puts-faith-in-iphone-streaming-to-
spread-word/12532)

