Thursday, February 17, 2011

Things To Know About Online TV Player Technology

By Ben Sparks


A great deal of energy and ingenuity goes into providing you with a television experience on the Web. As the technology is popular, however, it has become cheaper and so you can easily find an online TV player offering programs free of charge.

Streaming media and Person-To-Person, abbreviated P2P, are the delivery technologies that allow viewing of digital content in real time. When your program is streamed, it means that the digital information, encoded in packets, is sent to the site on which you are watching. This movement of information back and forth between sender and receiver is continuous and since it does not stop or slow many people can access and watch the program at any time. With P2P you use a network shared by many others. As you watch content downloaded to you the P2P system is uploading the same information to the network so that other people in your network may also view it. Contrasted with streaming video, in which the program providers create a system with enough bandwidth to carry the signals generated by use, P2P relies on the number of users to create a strong enough stream for quality video. So if there are not many users for the file you want to view in your network, video quality will be poor and y

Also, there are two ways of viewing programs online: live broadcast and on-demand. Live digital broadcast is made possible by streaming and will thus not be available to users of P2P protocols. Livecasting works online as it does on television: the event being viewed online is happening as it is being broadcast or in the case of prerecorded programming is viewed online at the same time it is premiering on television. With on-demand, the content is always pre-recorded, and is made available after the television broadcast is over. In this case the viewer selects the show he wants from either a menu of program titles or categories, then selects from a list of available episodes. He may then watch the program, and may watch it whenever he likes as long as that episode is available.

Bandwidth is crucial to the smooth viewing of online programming. Because a great number of users creates high demand, and because the more users there are, the more content is streaming over digital networks, a great degree of bandwidth is required. Bandwidth is the measure of how much data can move back and forth on a digital network. The larger the bandwidth, the greater amount of signal traffic it can handle. Video and sound information consists of a large amount of data, and for it to be delivered smoothly to the viewer it must move continuously. Many viewers means huge amounts of data constantly moving back and forth, requiring massive bandwidth. Low bandwidth will cause slow delivery of content, skips, and poor image and sound quality.

Multimedia software is what allows you to view digital video content. You can find most of these video players online, available to be downloaded free from the provider. For example, Apple provides Quick Time, Microsoft provides Windows Media Player. The browsing software in your computer may already include a media player. For instance, installing Windows also installs Windows Media Player. Sites that offer free downloads (or downloads you purchase), so long as they are compatible with your player, will deliver the video file to it, where it is stored and can be played at leisure. Most websites with television content already embed media players, although you will have to watch these programs on the site itself.

So, the digital media revolution has brought better, faster and affordable programs and application for delivering, storing and viewing video. As such, it is possible to recreate the experience of watching television on the internet through online TV player technology, and because of this, demand has increased and websites have sprung up with free content to meet that demand.




About the Author:



No comments: