In April 2007, I tried out the Joost desktop client.  [More on Joost here and here]

I was underwhlemed by the performance, and the fact that the application completely maxxed out my dual core CPU, my 2G of RAM, and my high-speed home broadband. I do remember thinking at the time that it seemed weird to have a Desktop Client in the first place. Well, as Om Malik reports this morning, it seems that I was not alone.

After this week’s hoopla over Chrome, moving in the direction of the browser seems like a wise thing to do. But I definitely hear far more buzz over Hulu than I do for Joost on the intertubes.

Update

Michael Arrington and TechCrunch weigh into the discussion.

Tags: browser, desktop client, Hulu, Joost, Malik, media, Om, Om Malik, Streaming, tv

Steve Gillmor comments on TechCrunch today that Comcast’s caps on bandwidth may finally drive people from the land of torrents, and to the land of streaming. [here]

While I agree that the promise of streaming is long overdue, there is the one area that streaming still can’t fill: The mobile viewer. I don’t mean folks on mobile phones, although with the growth of 3G in the Americas (Europe and Asia laugh at us in the area), the mobile market will become more important.

No, I am referring to the mobile, laptop-using traveller, mainly the business traveller, although leisure travellers are starting to take their laptops with them more often. Streaming doesn’t work on the road, in a hotel with a crappy connection, in an airport, or somewhere were the 3G isn’t 3G enough.

While streaming will become more prevalent, it won’t unseat the culture of Torrents for a few years yet. It will happen. But affordable, reliable connectivity saturation across the Americas has to occur first. And, in some ways, Comcast and the other providers are the ones hampering this process.

The focus of the connectivity providers on their dinosaur cage-match with the FCC has left them ignorant of the asteroid screaming toward them. In order to create a streaming market that they can profit from, they have to open the pipes, lower the costs, and increase the options for the consumer of their Internet/bandwidth services. If the connectivity they provide to the consumers can’t support the desire for the streaming economy, the Torrent reality will not fade away.

Tags: 3G, Americas, Asia, bandwidth, bittorrent, comcast, connectivity, Europe, fcc, Federal Communications Commission, Internet/bandwidth services, mobile phones, on-demand, steve gillmor, Streaming, Torrent

Over at NewTeeVee, there is a detailed look at the way that the streams were served and who served them. They also have a great discussion of the P2P and Torrent downloads, serving as an alternate method of getting the high quality streams out to a larger audience.

But John Furrier poses an interesting question, just before he quotes the entire NewTeeVee post: What’s the largest audience for a live stream?

Most of the streams that were viewed by people at NBC and other media providers were delayed. And while the concept of streaming is still valid, it doesn’t fulfill the promise of an “as it happens” delivery of streaming media.

So folks, what is the largest live video stream audience?

Tags: Furrier, live, NBC, NewTeeVee, Streaming, video

My bylined article Industry Perspectives: Best Practices for Flawless Web Multimedia Streams is up! Go check it out!

The discussion centers around how to approach monitoring and measuring the performance of Streaming Media, an area that is far more challenging than traditional Web page and site performance measurement.

There are a number of challenges an organization faces when deciding to adopt some type of streaming media strategy. The main one is “Do we go it alone?”.

The article addresses a number of these areas.

Tags: Industry Perspectives, Streaming, streamingmedia.com

For those of you in the US who are not blessed with a way to tap into the Canadian feeds from the World Cup, you are missing a real treat. And you know what the treat is?

Silence.

It seems that the announcers that Rogers SportsNet and TSN have recruited to cover the games know how to keep their mouths shut and let the action unfold on the screen, with occasional salient comments on the action.

As well, the screen isn’t cluttered with useless graphics and streaming ticker notes. Just the score and a timeclock in the top left corner that disappears, and re-appears in about 2-minute intervals.

Sometimes, just letting the game unfold is the best way to enjoy the beauty and skill of the teams.

Technorati Tags: World Cup, Canada, USA, Rogers SportsNet, TSN

Tags: app, Canada, feeds, HTTP, IE, IM, it, Om, sports, Streaming, Technorati

Geek News Central is reporting that their server is getting crushed with all the new iTunes 4.9 users. You had to know this would happen. People have heard the buzz and want to hear what it’s all about.

From a Web performance perspective, podcasts are hellish: large, uncompressible binary files. At least they are able to come along a single TCP connection. But at 10MB+ per file, iTunes is going to fill a lot of pipes, and max a number of bandwith caps.

Multicast streaming was supposed to alleviate this issue; podcasting is just going to make Web performance worse…or at least more noisy.

Now, how will the content distribution networks react? They are likely the only source that can help people relieve their load. The CORAL CDN Project is one source for open-source content distribution.

All in all, Web 2.0 is shaping up to be a bandwidth hog.

Technorati: web performance, podcasting, iTunes 4.9, iTunes

Tags: API, app, bandwidth, CDN, compress, content, distribution, HTTP, IE, IM, IP, it, Om, One, performance, pr, server, Streaming, TCP, Technorati, users, web, web 2.0, Web Performance, Web performance perspective, Web+performance

No, this is not a shameless attempt to drive me to the top of the rankings. It is a legitimate comment on a quiet little secret of the new Google Video Search.

Google co-founder Larry Page has announced that the company wants the public to send in its homemade videos - and he doesn’t’t mind how naughty they are.

“There might be an adult section, or something like that. I don’t think that is going to be a big issue,” Page told attendees at the National Cable and Telecommunications Show in San Francisco on Monday, where he was speaking on a panel.

Ouch! John Cheesman points out the HR nightmare that this will pose.

Then again, Google is just admitting what no other respectable online firm will: Internet porn is a huge untapped market for services.

Porn has been the innovator in the internet. It was the Commercial Internet for a long time. But none of the Web services firms are willing to approach or admit that they have major online adult entertainment companies as clients.

As a Web measurement geek, I have always seen this niche as a gold mine. Adult entertainment sites live or die on Web performance. Developers for adult sites are able to push the limits and demand more from their applications. They want to know where and how people connect to their site. They need to optimize their code and image/streaming delivery like few other sites do.

It’s time to get off the ivory tower and accept that adult entertainment could drive the online services revenue opportunity for a long time to come.

Tags: app, application, client, delivery, Google, HTML, HTTP, IE, IM, Internet, it, live, measurement, Om, One, online, optimize, performance, pr, San Francisco, search, seo, Streaming, video, web, Web Performance

Here is a little tidbit that we discovered while trying to debug an issue at work. One of my colleagues found that the Symantec/Norton Personal Firewall/Internet Security mangles the “Accept-Encoding” header sent out by any application — browser, streaming media, etc.

More can be found here.

This is a serious problem, and has a negative effect on Web performance in general, as one of the key methods for improving bandwidth consumption and user performance is Server-Side Compression of as much content as possible.

What the client wants to send:  Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate\r\n
What is sent:                   ---------------: ---- -------\r\n

What is the problem? Is this because Symantec can’t parse compressed content on the fly?

Tags: app, application, bandwidth, browser, client, compress, compression, content, deflate, EAD, Firewall, gzip, HTML, HTTP, IE, IM, Internet, Internet security, IP, it, media, Om, One, performance, personal, pr, server, Streaming, web, Web Performance