Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello, everybody,
Speaker 1: Welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Poulette. I'm
Speaker 1: an editor at how Stuff Works, and uh, as usual,
Speaker 1: sitting next to me, I've got senior writer Jonathan Strickland. Howdy,
Speaker 1: and uh I think we'll go merrily, merrily, merrily down
Speaker 1: the stream. Yes, yes, we're gonna talk about video streaming online. Um,
Speaker 1: you're probably familiar with the technology. Um, it's been around
Speaker 1: for quite some time. Um, you know he's tune in
Speaker 1: and spend twenty three minutes waiting for it to uh
Speaker 1: buffer so that you can watch it. Or you watch
Speaker 1: maybe two seconds of it and then it stops, and
Speaker 1: then you wait, and then you watch another second and
Speaker 1: it stops. Put it on pause, Gonna make a sandwich,
Speaker 1: come back. Or if you have a fast internet connection,
Speaker 1: like some of our friends out in San Francisco, you
Speaker 1: don't even know what we're talking about because you just
Speaker 1: watch it and it just plays as you're Actually that's
Speaker 1: probably true for most people, right, anyone who's done on
Speaker 1: dial up? Yeah, anyone who's not on dial upe probably has.
Speaker 1: You know, as long as the connection is pretty good,
Speaker 1: you're you probably have seen streaming video without too much
Speaker 1: of trouble. Yeah. But um, where we weren't really talking
Speaker 1: about applications like YouTube when we were discussing what we
Speaker 1: were going to talk about today, and uh, really what
Speaker 1: I was thinking about was more along the lines of
Speaker 1: sites like Hulu dot com. Um. And for those of
Speaker 1: you who are not familiar with Hulu, it is one
Speaker 1: of several that we're gonna mention. Um. But basically, you
Speaker 1: can tune in, watch a TV show, a movie. Um.
Speaker 1: Really the whole thing, you know, supported by advertising. Uh,
Speaker 1: pretty cool. Actually, yeah, it's in a tiny little window.
Speaker 1: It's not we're not talking you know, full screen. Well
Speaker 1: you can't make it, but it's blocking, right, it's it's
Speaker 1: the definition is lower than standard definition for your television.
Speaker 1: But you know, it's it's the fact that you have
Speaker 1: access to this pretty large library of content, um, legitimately,
Speaker 1: which is the that's the best part is that you
Speaker 1: don't have to worry about the site being taken down
Speaker 1: because you know, of violation of copyright laws. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: this is this is the actual content providers UM. In
Speaker 1: the case of Hulu, UM, it's Fox and NBC Universal,
Speaker 1: so you're seeing UM. In some cases it's way, you know,
Speaker 1: decades old TV shows, and other instances it's more UM
Speaker 1: modern stuff. UM. And in a lot of cases, if
Speaker 1: it's conflicting with current stuff, it'll be a few weeks
Speaker 1: behind or maybe old. They'll have just clips. UM. Star Galactica,
Speaker 1: for example, is the show which they don't have full
Speaker 1: episodes of, although you can watch the original show and
Speaker 1: go really, they decided to completely remake this. I know,
Speaker 1: why remake perfection? You already have perfected people. Okay, this
Speaker 1: is where I admit that I never watched a new
Speaker 1: episode of Ballstar Galactica, but I was a die hard
Speaker 1: fan of the original and if you disgrace it with
Speaker 1: any kind of comment, I will I will have to
Speaker 1: And I best theme music ever. It's the ringtone on
Speaker 1: my phone, people, And that is not a joke. So anyway,
Speaker 1: So anyway, but I was going to mention, so we're
Speaker 1: talking about Hulu being legitimate to give you an idea
Speaker 1: of an illegitimate one. Uh, there's a there's a site
Speaker 1: called TV links, tv TV dash links, and UM it
Speaker 1: was is and was because occasionally it gets taken down.
Speaker 1: As a site that hosts episodes of various television shows.
Speaker 1: I think it might have a few movies as well.
Speaker 1: Mostly it's TV and animation. UM. And it does not
Speaker 1: necessarily have the permission of the owners to show that material. UM,
Speaker 1: so it is that never happens. So it's one of
Speaker 1: those sites where there are lots and lots and lots
Speaker 1: of choices. UM, but you have to if you go there,
Speaker 1: you're going there with the knowledge that this site could
Speaker 1: not be there if if the content providers decide that, hey,
Speaker 1: you know what, this is just ridiculous, people are are
Speaker 1: watching our stuff without going through the proper channels, UM,
Speaker 1: then then yeah they could. They could certainly you know,
Speaker 1: sue TV links and say you can't do that, and uh,
Speaker 1: that's happened a couple of times. I mean there are
Speaker 1: times where if you tried to go to the website,
Speaker 1: it just you get an error message because it's been
Speaker 1: taken down. Um. But you know the reason that it
Speaker 1: was tempting for people to go there because there was
Speaker 1: they could access things that they couldn't necessarily access easily
Speaker 1: wherever they live, like in the United States, for instance,
Speaker 1: we don't necessarily have access to some of the programming
Speaker 1: that the BBC does. That's true, and they do offer
Speaker 1: quite a bit on the BBC website. But you have
Speaker 1: to be uh uh yeah yeah. If you're not, if
Speaker 1: you're not one of the Queen's subjects, then you're you're
Speaker 1: pretty much out of luck. You're subject to being blocked out. Exactly,
Speaker 1: you don't you can't access the material. Well, the same
Speaker 1: thing is true in other countries when they try and
Speaker 1: access sites over here is sometimes there are restrictions where
Speaker 1: they're not able to do that unless they're using some
Speaker 1: sort of weird proxy. Um um, and I want to
Speaker 1: I want to get back to Hulu in the legitimacy Hulu,
Speaker 1: but um, I should mention that there are other sites
Speaker 1: that do this. UM. Juiced is probably the most famous.
Speaker 1: UM that's not juiced like in You've just pulped grapefruit.
Speaker 1: It's more like j O O s T. And they
Speaker 1: founders of actually have Kaza oddly enough and Skype decided
Speaker 1: they wanted to do a streaming TV venture. And of
Speaker 1: course you'd think with that pedigree, you know, with because
Speaker 1: being part of it, go really but actually they have
Speaker 1: gone to great lengths to license a lot of content.
Speaker 1: They've got a PBS on board, the Public Broadcasting System CBS,
Speaker 1: Sony Pictures, TV, National Geographic UM. So a lot of
Speaker 1: people are involved in that. And they used to have
Speaker 1: a client, a software program that would run these TV shows,
Speaker 1: but now they offer just a plug in for your
Speaker 1: web browser, which makes it a little more simple to
Speaker 1: do that. And that's probably because Hulu, which people used
Speaker 1: to pick on for having a goofy name, UH, now
Speaker 1: is um more legitimate. But UM I also found out
Speaker 1: yesterday that Comcast Interactive has their own version of this
Speaker 1: called fan cast UM. They have full episodes of TV
Speaker 1: shows and movies and things like that too that they
Speaker 1: have licensed. UM. But talking about the legitimacy of UH
Speaker 1: of Hulu, UM, I was reading an article in Ours
Speaker 1: Technical by Nate Anderson, and to quote him, he says
Speaker 1: it's only a matter of time until the web loses
Speaker 1: its second class status when it comes to video programming. Well,
Speaker 1: last night, UH, we're recording this the day after the
Speaker 1: second presidential debate, and I watched the presidential debate live
Speaker 1: on Hulu dot com. And you know, it was probably
Speaker 1: not a big test for them because you got CNN
Speaker 1: and all the networks and competing with them. But it
Speaker 1: was a test and there were no hiccups. It was
Speaker 1: you know, smooth, it was easy to watch. You know,
Speaker 1: it was on my computer screen while I was working
Speaker 1: on something else, I could keep an eye on it. Um,
Speaker 1: And I'm thinking, you know, this could be legitimate, this
Speaker 1: could go you know, big time. Now. You know, Anderson
Speaker 1: says that people are not going to give out their
Speaker 1: TVs because that's you know, you got it in your
Speaker 1: comfy room. You got a wide screen TV. Why would
Speaker 1: you give that up in favor of an anybody window
Speaker 1: on your computer? But you know it's here's they start
Speaker 1: moving into live events. That's that's in a whole different
Speaker 1: And here's another argument. Sure, what if the TV evolves
Speaker 1: into a computer. I mean, there's no reason why television
Speaker 1: is going to stay in the same form factor it's
Speaker 1: in right now. But we know that's not the case.
Speaker 1: There there are Internet ready television's already being produced. Convergence. Man,
Speaker 1: that's what my you know what, it's the Singularity, it's
Speaker 1: coming brother. Um. But the no, seriously, the the whole
Speaker 1: idea of people aren't going to give up their televisions.
Speaker 1: They won't have to. They won't have to give up
Speaker 1: their TVs because their computers and their TVs will become
Speaker 1: one and the same. So you'll start seeing and it'll
Speaker 1: it'll be high end first. It will be the early
Speaker 1: adopters who will then drive the price down and you'll
Speaker 1: start to see televisions that are really you know, computers
Speaker 1: in a in a television form um, and you'll be
Speaker 1: able to use all these services and their their boxes
Speaker 1: out there that kind of allow you to do that
Speaker 1: to some extent um, like the Apple TVs in the
Speaker 1: world and the you know you've got the Netflix, the
Speaker 1: Roku right which is that opened up just recently too.
Speaker 1: They they had some new deals with Roku and that's
Speaker 1: uh for this box that you attached to your TV,
Speaker 1: very much like uh, you would a DVR or you know,
Speaker 1: cable or satellite box. But you know you've got more
Speaker 1: than twelve thousand titles already, so you can basically just
Speaker 1: download the video of the movie to your computer, you
Speaker 1: know box that goes on your TV. It's shot, you know,
Speaker 1: it's seamless and um, you know, even things like xbox
Speaker 1: and and PS three, the Voodoo you know. Um, these
Speaker 1: are all hardware solutions that are kind of bridging that
Speaker 1: gap between the computer and the TV. Yeah, and with
Speaker 1: services like uh um Verizons, Fious and some of the
Speaker 1: other things. You've got the bandwidth available coming you know,
Speaker 1: hiber Optic bandwidth two in New York City. You're set, yeah,
Speaker 1: pretty much because you can You've got the bandwidth to
Speaker 1: deliver that real time. Um. You know, you can even
Speaker 1: get some HD programming on on that connection now, so
Speaker 1: you have the same basically the same format. So you've
Speaker 1: got the right machine attached to your TV. You're you're
Speaker 1: pretty much set. You can download anything from New Who
Speaker 1: to use. So do you think programming is going to
Speaker 1: stay programming or do you think it's all just gonna
Speaker 1: be on demand in the future. That's a good question. Um.
Speaker 1: I think eventually we will see more of an on
Speaker 1: demand model. UM, I don't know. I think that's gonna
Speaker 1: be a ways off because people are really used to
Speaker 1: the whole programming. Like I tune in at eight p
Speaker 1: m to see this, or I set my t VO
Speaker 1: for a b M to that's the thing. It's all
Speaker 1: chipping away at the right it's it's and it is
Speaker 1: chipping away. I think it's gonna take a little longer
Speaker 1: before it actually heads off completely. I mean, for one thing,
Speaker 1: you've got advertisers who resist that so much because really,
Speaker 1: when you think about you know, advertisers, what they're looking
Speaker 1: at is they're looking to try and hit a specific
Speaker 1: demographic and they do tons and tons of studies that
Speaker 1: cost millions of dollars to find out when that demographics
Speaker 1: watching television. And if that demographics watching television at eight
Speaker 1: p m, then you can darn well bet that that's
Speaker 1: going to be the most expensive time to buy ads
Speaker 1: on television. But if you get it to the point
Speaker 1: where yeah, they're watching television at eight p m, but
Speaker 1: they're doing it on demand, so it doesn't matter. You know,
Speaker 1: you can't just target eight pm anymore because you have
Speaker 1: no idea what they're gonna be watching. That throws lots
Speaker 1: of monkey wrenches into their plans. So the world runs
Speaker 1: on money, and so yeah, it's chipping away. But until
Speaker 1: the financial like giants, the whole marketing UH scheme finds
Speaker 1: a way to to incorporate the whole on demand model, um,
Speaker 1: you're gonna see a lot of resistance within the industry,
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, but I think from what i've from
Speaker 1: what I understand some of the people who are using
Speaker 1: set top box DVRs. UM. I think TiVo in fact
Speaker 1: has a deal with Nielsen where they can pull some
Speaker 1: of that demographic information and they know even what ads
Speaker 1: are fast forwarding through and which ones you go, hey,
Speaker 1: that was kind of funny, and they back up and
Speaker 1: go go through that again. When you're using the Internet,
Speaker 1: you can totally track and see how many people are
Speaker 1: downloading a specific or streaming a specific video. So it
Speaker 1: seems like when the companies get over their initial fee
Speaker 1: or of that, they might say, well, actually I can
Speaker 1: get more information this way, right. Maybe it maybe that
Speaker 1: they start pro targeting, targeting specific programs as opposed to
Speaker 1: specific blocks of time. Um, and there's still gonna be
Speaker 1: one live things that people want to watch. Election coverage,
Speaker 1: for example, the Super Bowl, Uh, you know yeah, and
Speaker 1: we're gonna want to watch live as it happened, you
Speaker 1: know what. You know what we've been kind of talking
Speaker 1: about here besides besides streaming video kind of in a
Speaker 1: big picture way. Um, we've got a boy I keep
Speaker 1: using those without meaning to. Um, we've got a little
Speaker 1: catch catch phrase term that we use here at tech
Speaker 1: Stuff a lot. It's kind of like stuff you should know.
Speaker 1: They have the fight or flight reflex, and if you
Speaker 1: listen to that podcast Josh and Chuck, that's that's their
Speaker 1: go to phrase and you should absolutely listen to that,
Speaker 1: right you should, because they're very entertaining, uh and educational.
Speaker 1: But a tech Stuff already go to phrase is cloud computing,
Speaker 1: which is pretty much what we're talking about here With
Speaker 1: streaming video. The video is unless you're down noting it
Speaker 1: to a device like we were talking about earlier. If
Speaker 1: you streaming it, then that means that the video actually
Speaker 1: lives on computers that are owned by Hulu or whomever,
Speaker 1: not like if you bought a video from the iTunes store,
Speaker 1: download it to your Apple TV and watching on your
Speaker 1: that's a more traditional traditional as opposed to logging onto
Speaker 1: Hulu and watching, you know, an episode of thirty Rock
Speaker 1: or whatever. UM and I thought we could also talk
Speaker 1: briefly about some of the other services that that aren't
Speaker 1: necessarily geared towards the thing that Hulu is Hulu. You're
Speaker 1: you're getting um television programs and and seeing live events
Speaker 1: and things like that. UM, but there are other Like
Speaker 1: we talked briefly about YouTube. YouTube, of course is the
Speaker 1: site where you it's user generated content. You do find
Speaker 1: television shows occasionally on YouTube, you're not supposed to briefly, Yeah,
Speaker 1: as soon as as soon as someone raises a complaint
Speaker 1: about it, YouTube will move to h to take that down.
Speaker 1: I mean that's the problem is that, of course, if
Speaker 1: someone has a copy of that, they can it can
Speaker 1: pop up in another location almost as fast as you
Speaker 1: can take it down, or faster in some cases. But
Speaker 1: YouTube's men as user generated, as is a video which
Speaker 1: is another one. Uh, justin TV, which is almost like
Speaker 1: that's a live streaming video service like you stream. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so these are all different streaming video sites that really
Speaker 1: kind of cater to to the user experience. It's not
Speaker 1: necessarily a way to consume traditional media and a new format. Um,
Speaker 1: I was gonna talk about a neat little blogging thing
Speaker 1: called twelve seconds. Have you heard of this? I have
Speaker 1: heard of that, Yeah, pretty much about it. You've heard
Speaker 1: about it briefly, yes, because that's how long you have
Speaker 1: to You have twelve seconds in order to do a
Speaker 1: video post. You do a video post's about twelve seconds long.
Speaker 1: And so it's just your thought about something. It's kind
Speaker 1: of like the video version of Twitter. Yeah you saw
Speaker 1: where I was going with that, um same sort of yeah,
Speaker 1: nice no ice pounce. I was gonna work clerk in
Speaker 1: there somehow, but I don't. It just doesn't really fit.
Speaker 1: I'd come up with some other quicky thing, you know there.
Speaker 1: And there have been some pioneers in this whole streaming
Speaker 1: video format that have they've really kind of led the way.
Speaker 1: I mean. Part of this issue was really came to
Speaker 1: light during the whole writer's strike last year when the
Speaker 1: when the entertainment writers were striking. Uh, it was partially
Speaker 1: because of the argument about new media and what its
Speaker 1: place was going to be in the future and m
Speaker 1: the writers were arguing that they weren't going to be
Speaker 1: compensated fairly for their work when it was going to
Speaker 1: be shown over the internet, and then the media companies
Speaker 1: were saying, we don't even know if we can make
Speaker 1: money over the internet. Big mess, and uh uh, it
Speaker 1: looks like now you can see that, you know, there's
Speaker 1: it's gaining popularity. So at least the interest is there.
Speaker 1: Whether or not the money is there that still remains
Speaker 1: to be seen. But there's at least a port for it.
Speaker 1: There's a demand for it among the mark in the marketplace.
Speaker 1: So at least then the writers had that part straight.
Speaker 1: Writers were saying, hey, you know, people are gonna want
Speaker 1: to watch television on their computers. A lot of them
Speaker 1: were saying, Hey, my kids, that's all they use. They
Speaker 1: just use the computer to watch TV. Um, they don't
Speaker 1: ever turn the television on because there's what they want
Speaker 1: to see isn't necessarily on at that point. Um. And
Speaker 1: you even had people like like, uh, south Park, they
Speaker 1: they put all of their episodes up online on South
Speaker 1: Park Studios so you can watch and you could even
Speaker 1: watch the newest episode as soon as it finished airing
Speaker 1: on television. It was up on the site and you
Speaker 1: could watch it for about a week and then they
Speaker 1: would take it down. Um. But everything from the season
Speaker 1: before all the way to the very beginning of South
Speaker 1: Park you can find at South Park Studios. So with
Speaker 1: sort of like test cases like that, that's kind of
Speaker 1: how it led to where we are now. And then
Speaker 1: you have you know, internet only programming like Dr Horrible
Speaker 1: sing along blog. Yes, yes, I'll be applying to the
Speaker 1: Evil League of Evil tomorrow actually that's not even a choke.
Speaker 1: What are you going to do like suck us all
Speaker 1: into a black hole? You'll have to see. I'll just link,
Speaker 1: I'll twitter a YouTube post on there and people can
Speaker 1: can see my application. All right, but yeah, dr horrible.
Speaker 1: It's a great example. That was Josh weedon project where
Speaker 1: he wrote this piece specifically to see if it was
Speaker 1: a viable alternative to uh to to traditional television. Um,
Speaker 1: you may or may not know that we then has
Speaker 1: had a checkered past with the television industry or rather
Speaker 1: you know things like Fox or the WB or whatever. Um,
Speaker 1: that would be the television industry, right, yeah, yeah, specific
Speaker 1: parts of the television industry. But the the issue was
Speaker 1: that it was it was not always his vision that
Speaker 1: was going to to make it to the screen or
Speaker 1: they he would get his program would get moved around
Speaker 1: really quite a bit, so that it can never really
Speaker 1: gather an adiens. So you would have a hardcore audience
Speaker 1: that really loved a program, but it couldn't get footing
Speaker 1: with a larger broader base, um because of lack of support.
Speaker 1: And so he said, we know, why should we have
Speaker 1: to depend on this kind of delivery system when the
Speaker 1: Internet is there, and we can deliver directly to viewers
Speaker 1: reach a lot more people. We don't. We don't have
Speaker 1: to be beholden to this larger company that doesn't really
Speaker 1: care about us. And uh, I think Dr Horrible was
Speaker 1: a uh was sort of a proof of concept, you know,
Speaker 1: and uh, and it worked. People are demanding more and
Speaker 1: he said there will be more now. So yeah, I
Speaker 1: think the DVD will have a part four so and
Speaker 1: there may be more even further down the line. I
Speaker 1: guess it all depends on what everyone's schedules allow. But
Speaker 1: but there's definitely demands. So proof a concept. There you go.
Speaker 1: But if you're not streamed out, you can check out
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of streaming audio and video or us
Speaker 1: on our website, including you know how YouTube Works, which
Speaker 1: is available right now on tow stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: And we will talk to you again soon for more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how
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