Upcoming Trends in Streaming Media and Video Technology

Streaming Web media can be tremendously compelling, from listening to overseas radio stations broadcast over the Internet, to catching the up-to-the minute election coverage to watching streaming video shorts and movies. Yet streaming media can also be confusing and frustrating to work with, with multiple competing and changing standards, and severe quality degradation due to bandwidth constraints.

Explore today's streaming media industry and technology with me here in this article, which will focus upon the trends, that will revolutionoze whole sreaming media and digital video technologies.

Streaming Media Will Become More a Web-based Technology Than a Video-based Technology: A single person with a "prosumer" (PROfessional quality conSUMER electronics) digital video camera (using the MiniDV format) quickly captures the event in one or two takes. Post-production takes place on a PC with standard software like Adobe Premiere. The result is content that is developed specifically for the Web in a fraction of the time that it would take a traditional filming crew. These new technologies allow existing Web team staff with minimal training in video production to create high-quality streaming content.

Streaming Content Will Become More Synchronized with Other Media: More and more companies are creating a synchronized content that fulfills the Web's promise of interactivity. such as video programs that respond directly to individual user interaction and educational courses that build in real-time feedback.

Entertainment Will Be Out, Positive ROI Projects Will Be In: While the entertainment industry is still licking its wounds from numerous failed, ad-driven business ventures, business managers have found that streaming media is a cost effective way to train staff and partners, qualify sales leads faster, and enhance existing relationships.

Video Search and Mark-up Technology Will Continue to Improve: As corporations increase their use of streaming, applications that can search (find the appropriate clip) and mark up (identify keywords, concepts, and scenes) video will become more important to managing the knowledge embedded in the content.

Dynamic Content Will Replace Static Content: To mantain a great deal of manual intervention and presenting unique pages to different visitors, companies felt a need of data driven approach. More products will emerge that support the dynamic creation of streaming content and work in concert with application servers, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Knowledge Management (KM) systems.

Live Media Will Make Way for On-Demand (Pre-recorded) Content: Today many companies realized that they can get many of the same benefits of live streaming by using on-demand content, and they can do so at a fraction of the cost of doing it live. By adding interactive elements like chat, polling, and phone-in teleconferencing, thus they create the illusion of a live event without the on-the-spot performance pressures and expenses.

The reality is that streaming media is still in the very early stages of development. The state of the art today is a small video image, going out of focus, stopping and starting again a few seconds later in response to network congestion. It is not much better than the Kinetoscope peep shows people were watching over a century ago. Fortunately, the technology continues to improve. Eventually, a majority of viewers will watch streaming video that looks more like television. Additionally, features such as high-resolution graphics, interactivity, and personalization will ultimately make the delivery of streaming video over digital networks and the investment in high-powered computers and high-capacity networks worth the wait.