In the last few months I’ve been experimenting around with watching streaming video online for movies and TV shows. I’ve been highly skeptical towards online streaming and the hype that has preceded it for so many years, but I also have a few friends who love using streaming content. Given that nowadays you can rent videos and have them delivered to your door within a couple of days makes the effort of trying to stream a video and tie up your computer and internet connection seemed kind of silly of me. Still, it seems the technology to for online streaming has gotten a lot better in the last couple of years and video has become much more commonplace on the Web albeit mostly for lo bandwidth usage ala YouTube. So I started playing around with streaming video initially with Netflix streaming player while I was travelling in the last year. For the most part I’ve only been using two services Netflix and Hulu.com.
Netflix Online Streaming
I’ve been a NetFlix subscriber for a few years now and I’ve been very happy with the service they provide. I’m always amazed by the turnaround that manages to get videos returned back in two days from returning a previous video. I was also pleased to see NetFlix starting to offer streaming content with the Watch Instantly service. Although the selection for downloadable content is not anywhere near their full video collection, the selection is fairly decent (12,000 titles they say). What’s nice about the service is that Netflix makes it really easy to select movies add them to your queue and then play them on demand – usually once I start running out of videos rented physically.
The new Silverlight Netflix video player (currently in beta and an opt-in option until it gets released) is pretty slick and a big improvement over the old Flash based viewer in several ways. The UI for the player is much more flexible and more importantly it doesn’t suck CPU resources nearly as much as the old Flash player did.
Video quality steps up and down, depending on bandwidth available, which is actually unfortunate. There seems to be no option to determine your desired setting – Netflix does and can do so mid watching which really sucks when it happens and you get down throttled from TV quality 480p output back to whatever low bandwidth settings they use that pixelate heavily.
Hulu.com
Another site I’ve been using quite a bit is Hulu.com. Hulu provides streaming video content of a decent selection of movies and a ton of current TV serial content. Many currrent TV Shows are available on Hulu and you can watch them with only brief and bearable advertising breaks. For TV content – if you’re into that sort of thing - Hulu is hard to beat. Given that these days many TV shows provide higher quality content than the crap movies Hollywood is pumping out that’s not as far fetched as it once seemed to me.
Hulu also has a pretty nice flash based player that you can customize in a number of ways.
Quality is excellent in 480p mode but really sucks in the lower res mode as both video and sound quality are drastically reduced. The sound is actually more annoying than the lower video res in the low res mode.
One thing that’s a bummer about both Netflix and Hulu is that they cannot be accessed from out of country (or at least not easily and without IP spoofing). Due to licensing rules I suspect, but still a pisser – it sure would be nice to tap into online Netflix content while I’m out of the country but no such luck. Interesting side note: I’m in Austria at Markus Egger’s right now and he’s using XBox Live’s Netflix hookup from here to view streaming content. Apparently XBox gets around the international limitation when you sign in with a US account at least.
Other Video Sites
There are a few other sites I use occasionally. There’s obviously YouTube ,Google Video, Yahoo Video and MSN video which provide avenues for video sharing for everyday users as well as lots of current affairs and educational content. I like Google’s service as it has the advantage of allowing for longer videos vs. YouTube’s limited length videos that are limited to 10 minutes. Both sites really don’t fall into the same category as the others above – they are not for watching movies but for sharing video. Resolution is also much lower so video playback is never really a problem although quality is pretty weak even in the higher resolution modes offered by some videos.
Video is also becoming ever more popular for news and current affairs content. Most news sites and especially traditional news TV sites provide much of their content online. I for one have been pleased with this development as I travel quite a bit especially out of country and it’s nice to have access to US news source abroad as well as European sources when I’m in the US. Most news content is of surprisingly good video quality and runs reliably as well.
Then there are some kinda shady sites that offer movies like Watch Movies that provide links to movies including very recent ones. Shady – yeah definitely. You can watch movies that aren’t even out on video yet, and stored on diverse video sites under obscure names. I’ve checked this out mainly because a few people mentioned it to me – especially typically non-computer folks and kids – and I went just for novelty value and sure enough there’s lots of movie content of recent movies in all sorts of qualities from hand held bootlegs to fairly decent small screen quality. This is probably not worth anything except for novelty value, but not much beyond that.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that there are a lot of of YouTube like clones are popping up that provide specialized video content for a specific focused area of interest. Video content is getting much more popular all the time and content is popping up all over the place and in different contexts which is cool. As cool as all that is though it’s actually not as easy to find that content easily. Because it’s scattered all over the place and there is no official tagging mechanism with each site using its own search mechanism finding what’s available is a problem.
A few thoughts on High Quality Streaming
Having the ability to stream high quality video for watching movies like Netflix and Hulu is pretty cool mainly because it gives you choice. I tend to be a random TV watcher – usually I watch a movie or a show after I’m done at night to wind down. Having a physical DVD to watch is Ok, but you get to watch what you got home right now. With digital delivery the choice can be made based on how the mood strikes me and that’s a good thing. It’s also good to have access to some content for reference or be able to revisit is – useful for political documentaries I frequently watch.
But even though there’s a certain cool factor to watching full hi-res video on your laptop computer or piping the output from laptop to the big screen tv in the living room, the process of doing that is still pretty painful. Browsing for movies on these sites using the Web Browser and two screens is a pain in the ass if you’re watching on the big screen TV because the browsing and watching experiences are so separate.
Netflix is addressing this with software that’s getting built into many hardware devices that work directly with your TV. There’s the Roku console who’s sole purpose is to work with Netflix, and there are devices like a host Blue-Ray Net capable devices (Samsung, LG )that have network connections and can interface with the streaming service to pick and play movies directly from hardware you already have in the living room.
Using a computer in the living room might seem cool for the novelty of it, but realistically it is still a pain. So unless you have a full hardware setup that’s specific to a media center purpose it’s less than ideal as it fails the remote control UI test in my book.
Bandwidth and Service Issues
As nice as it is to watch digital content for me the experience has been a choppy one even on a fairly high bandwidth connection. Here on Maui, I have Roadrunner cable with what they call a 5 megabit connection and while I’ve never seen that kind of throughput it looks like 3-4 megabits, which is pretty good especially given the remote island gig and all (and that we had NO high speed at all until 2003!).
Even with this connection though, when running in 480p mode it’s barely enough to keep the video buffer stuffed. I’m not sure if the problem is on the inbound end or the outbound end, but it’s either way high definition streaming is choppy at best. Netflix is much worse in this respect as it frequently down shifts me into a lo-res mode and I have no control over this process. Hulu stays in whatever mode I selected, but it too stutters and loses frames from time to time.
It would really be nice if these streaming players would give you an option to buffer data for video up front – even allowing for downloading the entire movie up front possibly so that some of the choppiness could be mitigated, but alas the buffering is only real time so any network hiccup screws up playback.
Also if I put a strain on the bandwidth elsewhere on the network (even as trivial as checking email) and video play will definitely hiccup. For a typical internet connection the bandwidth is still not quite enough, unless you go for the gold plan of super high-bandwidth that some providers now offer (not in my area though <s>).
What’s also problematic is that recently many Internet Service Providers have started putting limits on the amount of bandwidth you are allowed on your ‘unlimited’ Internet access accounts. Video certainly doesn’t help bandwidth usage. When I started playing around with this stuff a few months back and watched a ton of online content after I returned from Europe I got a warning notice from RoadRunner that I went over some unspecified limit. Looks like more providers are going that route and that doesn’t bode well for video on the wire.
Incidentally, other than video my Internet Service is solid and plenty
CPU Usage
Also both Netflix and Hulu are major CPU hogs. If you look at the Hulu screen shot you can see process manager running and it’s got 1 of the dual core processors nearly pegged at 100% and the machine is audible running in overdrive. The CPU usage for Flash apparently is so high that on an older Pentium M class machine 480p conversion doesn’t play smooth at all with constant dropped frames which are apparently not due to the bandwidth alone as it plays smoother on my dual core machine. Heck even in lo-res mode the older machine can barely keep up even though it has a reasonably decent video card. Ouch.
The Netflix Silverlight player fares a bit better, but CPU usage is still pretty high in the upper 70’s% range on the core it runs on.
Content is lacking
The final road block is that although content is rapidly expanding, when it comes to commercial video online you’re bound to have a much more limited choice online than you get with DVDs from a place like Netflix. For example, Netflix’s on demand library is a fraction of the full DVD library which is surprising. Hulu.com’s library is frustrating in its incompleteness especially for serial content – usually you can view only most recent content back for about a year. The truly universal library that provides access to most or all video content doesn’t really exist yet, but that’s really the siren call for online, ondemand video streaming.
Ultimately this point is the biggest strike against online streaming I think – selection above all wins! This all comes back to the movie industry’s fear of digital distribution I suspect, copy protection and byzantine rights management agreements which are the most likely culprit that stand in the way of broader distribution. Bummer.
Bottom Line
The bottom line for me is this: Streaming video in hi-res with either of these sites uses tons of bandwidth and computer horsepower. As far as we’ve come with video on the computer, it still looks like the sweet spot is another generation of hardware and bandwidth away at least for mainstream computer hardware. Combined with the short
At the moment I wouldn’t want to trade in my DVD rentals for only online even if Netflix actually had all content available online, but still it’s interesting to see how far we’ve come. The new apps look and work slick but it feels like we need another generation of bandwidth improvements and video hardware improvements to make this all work a little smoother. Small scale video ala YouTube and News Feeds seems Ok right now – reliable and smooth, but the full screen hi-res movie experience is not there yet.
So what about you? What video services are you using if any and what’s you’re experience been for quality, bandwidth usage and limits from ISPs? I’d be curious to hear especially from folks who have those really high bandwidth accounts.