Considerations

The Internet offers businesses a platform to deliver rich-media content to an end user’s computer. This gives benefits to both the originator of the content and in some instances the recipient as well. There are, however, several factors that need to be considered when delivering media across the Internet and the connection speed is certainly an important one. Until fairly recently, broadband speed connections were not well established in the UK home market and most people relied on dial-up connections which gave a maximum speed of 56Kbps.  This meant that websites which contained rich-media were fairly uncommon and any media that was streamed or available to download (whether audio, video, or a mixture of both) was usually highly compressed and of a low quality due to the length of time it would take to transfer. 

‘Early streaming products, adapted from entertainment applications, were simply not suitable for enterprise use and organizations were forced to hire specialists to perform hours of pre- and post-production work before a presentation or lecture could be available on the Web.’ (Dias 2004)

Invariably, this would have an impact on the end user’s experience and enjoyment but as internet connections have progressively got faster and cheaper, the potential audience for rich-media delivery has increased.  And importantly, the quality of the media has improved which makes it more appealing for the recipient.  These factors have encouraged businesses to employ rich-media on the Internet for advertisement, promotional purposes, or simply for aesthetic reasons with rich-media now common on many web sites via browser-integrated software such as Adobe Flash Player or Real Player. It should be noted though, that Adobe Flash Player can provide more interaction and is commonly used for web site interfaces.

According to the Office of National Statistics, in 2007, nearly 15 million households in Great Britain (sixty one percent) had Internet access and of these, eighty four percent had a broadband connection. The relatively recent popularity of broadband (and other high speed connections) gives opportunities to businesses and individuals to create and distribute their media with a (potentially) global audience able to receive it.

Delivering Media on the Internet

There are two main ways to deliver media across the Internet.  With these methods, there are different network protocols employed and the technicalities of these will be discussed at a later point. Simplified for now though, the first method is that of providing a hyperlink on a web page. This link would typically point to a file stored on a server and then when clicked, the web browser will give an option to save the file to the computers hard-disk which can then be played off-line, for example an AVI (video) file or an MP3 (audio).  This is known as download and play.

The other method is known as streaming and this is when the media is again stored on a server but instead of being available to download, it is broadcast, or streamed, to the users’ computer, and then interpreted and played back using a relevant player for the format.  This method is particularly popular with companies that wish to protect their material because no copy of the media is stored on the users’ hard-disk.  Common streaming formats include Windows Media Audio/Video (WMA & WMV), Real Networks (RA & RM), Adobe Flash (FLA), and Quicktime (MOV).
 
Depending on the type of business, a company (or individual) may find one method preferable to the other.  An online MP3 store, for example, may use both methods in its functionality.  It could use streaming audio to output previews of tracks to the user. This would satisfy copyright and commercial considerations because the user would not be provided with a permanent copy of the MP3 file.  For extra security, the preview file could also be of a lower quality than normal (i.e. a low bit-rate).  

Then, once a track had been chosen and purchased, the web site could employ the download and play method to output a high quality file for the user to download and keep. In the above example, the download link for the permanent file would be randomly generated by the code powering the web site (a language known as PHP is commonly used for this) once the purchase was completed and it would likely expire after twenty four hours to avoid other users accessing it who have not paid for the file.

Network Protocols & Technical Considerations

The Internet employs a series of protocols to distribute information across the various networks which it is composed of. To send information across the Internet, a lower level protocol known simply as the Internet Protocol (abbreviated to IP) is used to send data packets. Packets are simply bytes of information. These packets contain relevant information such as the sender and recipients IP address as well as how many packets the data has been split into.  How these packets are handled by the server and client (recipients’ computer) depends on the upper level protocol that is used in conjunction with the IP, for example TCP/IP or UDP/IP.

The two main upper level protocols which are relevant to web sites and the distribution of media are (as mentioned above) known as TCP and UDP. TCP stands for Transmission Control Protocol and UDP is an abbreviation for User Datagram Protocol.  The situations in which either is used are different and I will explain these with examples below, starting with TCP.

‘TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is the most commonly used protocol on the Internet’ (Rodriguez 2004).  

This quote gives an indication of what TCP is mainly used for.  It is the protocol which is responsible for the sending of web pages and email, as well as database information etc.  TCP is used because it employs error correction which means that if a packet of information is lost, or not received, the server will be instructed to re-send the packet in order to fully reconstruct the original data.  Because of this error correction, TCP is useful due to the fact that if, for example, packets were lost whilst a web browser was loading a web page and the data was not re-sent, the web page would be displayed incomplete. However, the error checking and stability offered by TCP/IP sacrifices speed and this means that whilst being useful for displaying web pages or for download and play situations (where file totality is essential), it is not ideal for streaming applications where speed is a high priority. 

‘UDP is never used to send important data such as web pages, database information, etc; UDP is commonly used for streaming audio and video’ (Rodriguez 2004).

UDP should not be used where packet loss is an unacceptable factor in the delivery of the content. However, with streaming media, occasional packet loss is not a big problem. Although it is far from ideal, the result of packet loss whilst watching a streaming video or listening to streaming audio, would be frame skips or audio dropouts respectively but using UDP, the media would carry on streaming from the most recent packet received rather than waiting, and then reloading from the point of the packet loss. To most casual recipients, the occasional glitch would be of little consequence.

Conclusion

When devising content rich web experiences, the business (or individual) needs to think about how they want their media to be received by the end user.  Embedding media in a web page for streaming is often seen as a professional option and would be of benefit for businesses because the end result is more integrated into the experience of browsing a web site and would not require the user to launch external players, which could distract them or encourage them to lose interest from the web site.

This is especially useful for advertisements because no user interaction is necessarily required. However, a dedicated streaming server that supports UDP will almost certainly be a requirement for the content provider.  Preparing media for streaming is also quite technical and may require specialist intervention.  It should also be noted that not everyone will have the required player installed on their machine, so this could potentially limit the audience depending on the format chosen for the embedded content.

Users with a slow connection would also find streaming media of limited appeal but as faster connections are becoming more common, this is probably less of an issue. Aside from the presentation and aesthetic factors, if copyright protection is of crucial importance then streaming media is probably the most realistic choice. 

The download and play method is preferable if the content is intended to be kept by the recipient (i.e. an MP3 from iTunes or another online music store) and there are Digital Rights Management (DRM) options available that can be implemented to help protect downloaded files.  One major advantage of the download and play method though, is that the media (depending on the DRM implemented) is portable.  For example, a user could download an album, and then transfer it to his or her MP3 player for more convenience.  This kind of flexibility is not really possible with streaming media technology but that (by definition) is one of its intentions.