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To Move or not to move

Yesterday it was kickofftime of the potentially most bandwidth consuming service we have ever launched. Together with 100% football, VG released a new player to the norwegian flash/windowsmedia dominated marked, the MovePlayer.

The player is being developed by MoveNetworks in Utah, and has a large amounts of the web-tv market in USA, for customers like ABC, Fox, Espn and even Oprah :)

So why did we go for something completely new to the norwegian market?
The choices were originally few. Flash based or Microsoft based(Windowsmedia/silverlight).
But luckily Ketil from Bt had been doing his homework. He had seen the Moveplayer at work. I must say i was sceptial at first, but the more more i dug into this new technology, the more I loved it.

So how does it work?

The Move technology is abit different than ordinary streaming.
First, lets have a look at the content delivery servers. Its a web server. Period.
Apache, Lighty, Ngnix, hell even IIS.

The web was desiged for delivering lots of small files and thats what Move does. The content is split up into thousands of small files, and again into files containing the same content, but at a different bitrate.

So whats the advantage?

First of all, its instant, no buffering or waiting.
Here is how: The player contacts the webserver and asks for the files with a small bitrate for that piece of content. As it starts to play, it gradually pick up files with a larger bitrate. That is why the picture is normally not very optimal at first, but if you give it some seconds, the picture will be as optimal as your own bandwidth and CPU permits you.

Wait, CPU and own bandwith?
Yes, the player detects the amount of free bandwidth you have available and starts downloading the correct bitrate to fill your line. So if you`re already downloading stuff or watching something else that fills your line, your quality in the MovePlayer will suffer.
Same thing with CPU. If your cpu is not powefull enough, or bogged down in other stuff, the player will reduce the quality.
But in any cases, you`ll still get an image. It will not stop to buffer up again. Personally I prefer lower quality than a stream that buffers.

Another advatage is that the content is cacheable. If you are an ISP, large company or of another reason want to save bandwidth, set up a httpcache(that supports the Range Header), and voila!

Today is the first great test, lots of matches. Im confident we'll ride the storm, but it will be interesting. Yesterday vglive.no had 11000 hits per second, im looking forward to see how high we can go :)

And to all of you Linux people out there, sorry. You can try to install windows firefox with wine, and then install the moveplayer. I got it to work on one pc, not the other one.. We can just hope Move will create a player for us, but the last time i spoke to them.. i wouldnt hold my breath.

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Etiketter: football, Moveplayer, scaling, vg