STREAMING VIDEO, WHAT IS IT AND HOW DO I USE IT?
By Lorraine Grula
Internet Video Gal

Streaming video is one of the greatest leaps in technology for distributing video on the Internet.

Simply put, streaming video means your viewer can see your video right away. They don't have to wait impatiently for a huge file to slowly download from start to finish; they see it as it is downloading.

Streaming video lets anyone with a decent Internet connection playback your video on their desktop. Depending on the speed of their connection, your video can be playing within a few seconds of their clicking GO! To provide a more smooth viewing experience, a few seconds of data is sent ahead and buffered before play begins. This is done to hopefully avoid the video stopping if it encounters one of the many common hiccups or network delays.

You may have experienced such problems yourself. While watching your favorites on YouTube, have you ever noticed that some videos stutter, jerk, break into pixels and pause instead of playing smoothly? The video itself is not the problem, the stream is.

Stutters happen when the download speed can not keep up with the real time speed of the video and play is halted while more can download. Play usually resumes automatically.

You can't watch a five minute video smoothly if the download time is a pokey ten minutes. That's another great reason for Internet Video Producers to keep their file sizes small!

Check out tomorrow for the TWO KINDS OF STREAMING

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