What is Streaming?
Streaming is what allows you to consume online content without having to wait for it to download. Are you listening to some tunes while you browse the internet? Or catching up on Friends reruns in another tab? That means you’re streaming right now!
Gone are the days where you had to spend hours downloading a few songs. With the rise of music platforms like Apple Music, Pandora, and Spotify, and TV and movie repositories such as Netflix, HBO GO, Hulu, and Disney+, streaming is more popular than ever. But how does streaming work, exactly? Are there any downsides to streaming? (Hint: yes.) Read on for all the details on how streaming works, what to watch out for, and what innovations in streaming you can expect to see soon.
How does streaming work?
Streaming affords us the ultimate convenience in media consumption: just press a button and your song, show, or movie starts immediately! But how does streaming work?
Streaming is a means to send and receive data (such as audio or video) in a continuous flow over a network. It allows playback to begin while sending the rest of the data. For example, as soon as your
computor phone receives the beginning of a movie, you’re able to start watching it. As the movie continues playing, the rest of the data gets transmitted.
As long as you have a reliable internet connection, your device is able to play the entire movie smoothly without interruption. Any time you’ve used music services like Spotify or Apple Music, video players like YouTube or Netflix, or some types of games and apps, you’ve used streaming in action.
For companies to provide content for streaming, they’ll need servers or cloud platforms for storage. Big players like Netflix have content delivery networks that keep the most popular content cached and close to where it will be streamed, in order to reduce latency and bandwidth costs.
As a consumer of streaming content, you’ll need reliable internet with sufficient speed. It’ll need to be at least 2 Mbps (megabits per second) to provide a good streaming experience (meaning no delays or reductions in quality). While you stream content, the data is delivered to the buffer, which stores the next few seconds or minutes that are coming in the song or show. If your connection is too slow, you’ll constantly see pauses while your device works on buffering. If you want to watch in HD or 4K, you should have an even faster connection of at least 5 Mbps.
How does streaming differ from downloading?
Note that streaming and downloading are not the same. When you want to download a movie or song, the file gets saved on your hard drive. In most cases, you can only begin watching or listening once the download has completely finished. And once you have the file, it takes up space on your hard drive. If you want to use a lot of large media (such as HD movies), you would quickly fill up all of your available space. Streaming, in contrast, plays media without downloading the file, so it doesn’t eat up precious hardware space.
Which types of content can be streamed?
In today’s media landscape, there is a wide variety of content that you can stream. Music and video are the most traditional forms, but increasingly, there are new streaming options available including games, apps, and even live events.
Music and other audio
Audio streaming, including both music and podcasts, has become incredibly popular. Music streaming allows you to play tons of songs by different artists, all without having to download a single file. Services like Apple Music, Spotify, and Pandora provide millions of tracks available for streaming at the touch of a button. Some, like Pandora, have you select a genre or mood, and they curate playlists for you. Others like Spotify play exactly what you select — though playlists are also a major component of the platform. Apple Music offers a mix of both options.
Podcasts can be either streamed or downloaded to listen to later, and they’re available through services like iTunes and Stitcher. You can also stream audio files you own to other devices (such directing your phone to play audio files via your Bluetooth speaker) within your home.
Video
Video was the first mass streaming hit, starting with services like YouTube. Instead of having to download large multimedia files, video streaming involves compressing the data into small packets and sending them to your device where they’re decompressed and displayed. During a streaming session, the video is constantly buffering — while you’re viewing one packet of data, the next is in the process of decompressing so you can view the whole movie or TV show without gaps.
Some of the most popular video streaming services today are YouTube (still!), Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Google Play, and the newest large-scale editions to the scene: Disney+ and 7UPTV.
Video streaming saves you a lot of time and hassle
by Nica Latto
David https://markethive.com/david-ogden