Full stream ahead

Full stream ahead

As the world of technology continues to rapidly expand. Geof Jones of Clikingo explains the benefits to business of the new phenomenon of video streaming.

There’s been an explosion in the popularity of digital video and Internet content in the past two years, and high profile buy-outs such as Google’s acquisition of YouTube for $1.7billion, have raised even more awareness of the medium. With amateur videographers and film hobbyists able to quickly upload personal footage onto the Internet for global consumption, the shift from terrestrial television channels to online viewing is rapidly changing the multimedia landscape.

In what can be viewed as a largely consumer-led revolution, companies in the broadcasting or telecommunication arenas are being forced to rethink how they relay information to the masses.

Geof Jones, Director and owner of Clikingo, a new media and video production company, makes videos for SMEs and blue chip clients. He points out that, up until a few years ago, any company or business who wanted video and sound information (multimedia) disseminated about their company would have to pay a large amount of money, firstly for the production and secondly for the distribution.

‘Everything has changed because of the Internet,’ says Geof. ‘Historically, the only way to get a multimedia message about your company across to the general public has been to secure astronomically-priced television advertising, or to produce and send out information DVDs, which is also very expensive not to mention labour-intensive. Both of these approaches have required a lot of input from any given company as well, and they’ve had to be particularly proactive in reaching out to the customer. But now, it’s possible for companies of any size and structure to inexpensively commission a video, and then have it streamed online for a nominal fee.

‘For a few thousand pounds, or even just a few hundred, companies are now able to reach a global audience with high-quality video. This giant leap in communication is something that was almost impossible to get your head around ten years ago. Mainly it’s because the technology has matured, and more people are broadband connected, which means they can send and receive much larger amounts of data. Think of it as the difference between pushing water down a straw or through a mains pipe. With slow dial up connections on the Internet ten years ago, it was as though everyone was pushing information through a straw; now everything is wide open and the capacity is far greater.’

So what is the technology behind the humble computer screen that makes it possible for such a rapid exchange of information to occur?
‘Everything that enables it to occur happens “out there”, in the place that people have come to call the virtual world’ adds Geof. ‘But it’s not virtual at all. It’s quite real. Big servers handle incomprehensible amounts of information every second – for instance, YouTube, just one site, gets about 100 million visitors a day. And it’s the ever-improving streaming technology that enables this to happen. Streaming, put simply, is a word to explain the way data – in this case multimedia – is transferred. The information is compressed and decompressed so that the viewer can start to watch or listen to a file before they have fully downloaded it. While you are watching a small part of the file, the rest is downloading in the background. You need to have a rock-solid server, or backend, to take care of this. In our case, we have an exclusive deal with a US company called Dayport, which handles all of our streaming. They also take care of bigger players including BskyB, and they ensure that all of the videos we produce are streamed online for our clients and are completely totally glitch-free. After all, nobody wants to watch anything that stops and starts all of the time.’