Streaming Media Analysis
In earlier days of the Internet, visitors wanting to view video clips or listen to sound bytes had no choice but to download files to their hard drive and then play the clips locally.
Though functional, this method was highly cumbersome, especially for those using analog modems.
One of the most promising and exciting new features of the Internet is its ability to deliver high-quality sound and video clips to your desktop without the need to download excessively large files that slow down your network.
Streaming audio and video allows enormous files stored on a server's hard drive to be "transparently" downloaded by a visitor. Thus, only a small section of the clip is downloaded at any one time.
That section is then "played" through a player program (QuickTime, RealVideo) external to the browser and immediately deleted from the visitor's hard drive. The next section is downloaded, played and deleted and so on, enabling a relatively feeble Internet connection to handle exceedingly large media files without becoming overloaded.
As soon as a streaming media file is called through a link in a user's browser, the player is launched and the clip begins to play.
Before a visitor's download commences, video compression software on the streaming server thins out the file by first reading each frame of the 30-frameper- second source file, determining which frames are crucial to viewing and deleting those considered redundant.
When a streaming media visitor begins to view their chosen clip, the 30-frameper- second source file has already been whittled down to the most important frames, enabling much faster performance. statistics.
Some streaming servers can perform a pre-download analysis of a visitor's Internet connection, allowing for customized compression levels. A visitor with a fast Internet connection will receive media files with fewer frames cut out.
If you serve sound or video files from your server, you can use Funnel Web's built-in streaming media analysis feature to learn a great deal about streaming media activity on your site.
Like other types of files, Funnel Web can tell you how many times your media clips were called by the server.
In addition, you can learn how many times a visitor viewed a clip, when they pressed the stop and start buttons, and much more. Information on streaming media files is displayed in a special "streaming media" report within Funnel Web's report folder.
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