Why isn't there streaming TV on the internet?

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ponyfool

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There is streaming radio, why not TV? If Netflix and others are offering full length movies over the internet, and Comcast and other cable providers are offering on demand, why not TV?

Just curious.

 
There is some, I have watched some old shows on AOL. Advertisers pay a premium for tv, that might be your answer.

 
There is a bandwidth problem, but it can be dealt with.

A production company I part-time camera-man for has a switching console that can stream real-time in Windows Media, but it's not even Youtube quality, from what I remember of it. It'll stream nicely to a LAN, but over the Internet you have to cut it to the bone.

For comparison, an hour's worth of 192k/second audio MP3 files is 80 to 90 megabytes. An hour of DVD-quality Mpg video, with sound, is about 2 gigabytes, maybe 25 times the data. To stream that, you'd need to be able to send about a megabyte per second out of your server (allowing for some overhead), which is about 10 times T1 speed.

This is what dvix and mpeg4 are for. They have another order of magnitude in compression. An hour of high-quality dvix will be 3/4 gigabyte, and that's still full-screen. You can easily drop it to say, 320x240, 15 fps and be under a 100 megs, maybe. But you can't stream that real-time, it has to be converted and rendered from the source material, which can take quite a while, depending on the PC doing the conversion.

Now to be clear, My discussion about "can't be done" means you can't stream a reasonable-quality picture simultaneously with the actual broadcast, which is what I assumed you meant by streaming TV. You can convert it and host it somewhere just fine.

 
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