Streaming works behind the scenes of many popular devices, including computers, tablets, and smartphones. Using richly colored photographs and diagrams, and relatable examples from everyday life, this book examines the remarkable science behind streaming media.

* Learn the end-to-end process, starting with capture from a video or audio source through to the consumer's media player * A quick-start quide to streaming media technologies * How to monetize content and protect revenue with digital rights management For broadcasters, web developers, project managers implementing streaming media systems, David Austerberry shows how to deploy the technology on your site, from video and audio capture through to the consumer's media player. The book first deals with Internet basics and gives a thorough coverage of telecommunications networks and the last mile to the home. Video and audio formats are covered, as well as compression standards including Windows Media and MPEG-4. The book then guides you through the streaming process, showing in-depth how to encode audio and video. The deployment of media servers, live webcasting and how the stream is displayed by the consumer's media player are also covered. A final section on associated technologies illustrates how you can protect your revenue sources with digital rights management, looks at content delivery networks and provides examples of successful streaming applications. The supporting website, www.davidausterberry.com/streaming.html, offers updated links to sources of information, manufacturers and suppliers. David Austerberry is co-owner of the new media communications consultancy, Informed Sauce. He has worked with streaming media since the late nineties. Before that, he has been product manager for a number of broadcast equipment manufacturers, and formerly had many years with a leading broadcaster.

Whether you're watching a movie, bingeing on a classic TV show, or listening to your favorite song, you're probably streaming it. Videotapes, DVDs, and CDs are mostly just memories now. Streaming puts a world of options at your fingertips when you're at home and, with a smartphone or tablet, when you're on the go. Find out how streaming was invented, how it works, and what the future might hold for this part of a high-tech life.

This book describes the steps for creating an on-demand and live streaming video in an all-in-one refernce guide for new users and companies that need introduced to the technology. After reading this book, you will understand: - How the Internet works in relation to streaming media - Client/server technology, specifically related to streaming media - Strengths and limits of streaming media, including best uses for the technology - Choices of streaming media content creation tools

An innovative investigation of the inner workings of Spotify that traces the transformation of audio files into streamed experience. Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet such disruption always comes at a price. Spotify Teardown contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption. Borrowing the notion of “teardown” from reverse-engineering processes, in this book a team of five researchers have playfully disassembled Spotify's product and the way it is commonly understood. Spotify has been hailed as the solution to illicit downloading, but it began as a partly illicit enterprise that grew out of the Swedish file-sharing community. Spotify was originally praised as an innovative digital platform but increasingly resembles a media company in need of regulation, raising questions about the ways in which such cultural content as songs, books, and films are now typically made available online. Spotify Teardown combines interviews, participant observations, and other analyses of Spotify's “front end” with experimental, covert investigations of its “back end.” The authors engaged in a series of interventions, which include establishing a record label for research purposes, intercepting network traffic with packet sniffers, and web-scraping corporate materials. The authors' innovative digital methods earned them a stern letter from Spotify accusing them of violating its terms of use; the company later threatened their research funding. Thus, the book itself became an intervention into the ethics and legal frameworks of corporate behavior.

Streaming media has irreversibly revolutionised the ways in which media is transmitted and consumed. Most of us engage with streaming media on a daily basis via platforms that deliver our entertainment: Spotify, YouTube and Netflix are new brands which many of us engage with daily for our information and entertainment. It has created upheaval in the entire value chain and wiped out industries slow to adapt to it (like the video store rental chain). And it continues to evolve. Streaming media is transforming business communications in myriad ways, and it is becoming almost as crucial for project managers and marketers to understand streaming technology as it is for media professionals. The Streaming Media Guide demystifies the technology and features behind a successful streaming media service, especially in the context of how it is used by broadcasters and other media organisations. Common terms and systems being used in this space are presented and defined simply and clearly for non-technical readers. Best practice examples from Michael D'Oliveiro's experiences demonstrate how this technology can be successfully implemented. This book equips any media professional with the most basic of traditional media knowledge to enable confident conversations in the typical media organisation they work in. For technology-based graduates or dedicated broadcast professional seeking to refresh their understanding, this book provides enough information to form a solid foundation for day-to-day work. Finally, for leaders in cross-functional senior management matrices, information is provided to enable you to understand and exploit streaming media capabilities as a business. This will be the ultimate reference source, guaranteed to be bedside reading for anyone serious about using streaming media.