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Now Hear This! Audio Streaming is Hot
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We all want our sites to standout among the hordes of mediocre sites that are on the Internet. Audio Streaming is one way to do that.
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What is Audio Streaming?
It refers to a standard of passing audio information (sound) from an Internet server to an end-user. There are multiple ways of doing this. Until now, if you wanted sound on your site, you could upload a MIDI (.mid) or Wave (.wav) file to the server and then put the EMBED tag into a HTML block in EZ-PageBuilder. The problem with this is that the entire audio file would download before the page could be seen and before the audio could be heard. With relatively small MIDI files, that was not a major issue. However, MIDI files have limited applications, and Wave files are generally very large, requiring large downloads. Enter audio streaming. With audio streaming, the user need not download the entire sound file to hear it. Instead, a proprietary compression process is utilized which passes the file across in small pieces, called packets, which are received sequentially. So, while you are listening to the first packet, the fourth packet is being received. The result is a 10-second wait to hear a sound file as opposed to a 10-minute wait!
What Are the Issues Involved?
Until now, to hear an audio stream from a site, users had to have a player installed such as RealPlayer™ or Windows Media Player™. If the user didn’t have one of these two standard players or didn’t have the right version, he would have to take the time to download the latest player before they could listen. The cutting-edge technology utilized in EZ-NetStream allows the stream to play without a player. The user merely has to have a java-enabled browser, which 93% of users do. No player is required! This is an enormous advantage.
Another issue involved with audio streaming has to do with packet latency or even loss. Because the Internet is such a transitory animal, you never know exactly how fast those packets are going to travel. A router failure, high traffic volume, poor line quality, and a host of other potential variables can cause a packet not to arrive on time. This is overcome with buffering. Multiple packets are loaded into a buffer so that if the next packet arrives a little late, the next one will play out of the buffer and the user should be none the wiser. While buffering has been a tremendous improvement, packet latency and packet loss (which contributes to rebuffering of your media) still occur occasionally. The vast majority of you heard the sound just fine, but we did receive a few messages from users saying that it sounded choppy. One AOL user even said that he couldn’t properly view the page because the buffering was too much for his ISP and he got kicked off. The main thing to know is that most, but not all, people will be able to hear the sound.
One other significant issue has been cost. Because the compression utility is proprietary and not a lot of them were out there, the cost of creating the stream file has been high. Also, finding a host to support that file and make it available online has been difficult and costly. EZ-NetStream will eliminate these problems. With the technology that we offer, we are able to provide the compression utility absolutely FREE!!! This utility allows you to convert any ordinary Wave (.wav) file to a streaming audio file. In the past, just doing this conversion could cost hundreds of dollars. Also, hosting the file will be extremely reasonable.
When will it be Available?
Bruce’s introduction on the teaser page was the first streaming audio file that we have implemented, and we were very pleased with the result. At home on my less-than-cutting-edge PC, connected to the Internet at a stated 42 kbps, I was able to hear the file clearly and quickly. The same was true for the vast majority of you. However, we are still testing the technology and preparing it for widespread implementation. In the near future, we plan to make it as simple to use as adding an EZ-NetStream block to EZ-PageBuilder. In the meantime, if you would like to be a “guinea pig” in our testing, please email us. And for those interested in video streaming, rest assured that the plans are already in the works and the technology is under development. When it’s ready, you will hear it here first.
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