Choosing a Server

Once you have saved your video file in a streaming format, you have to upload it to a server. You could store it on your HTTP server which hosts your website, or you could upload it to a specialized streaming server.

A streaming server offers several advantages over an HTTP server, and is always needed for high demand videos. If your streaming video will only receive a few hits per day, you will be able to serve it from your HTTP server.

Media Players

When you create online streaming video, the format you choose will usually dictate which media player which is needed to view it. For example, a video file in the Windows format (.WMV) requires the Windows Media Player to be installed on the viewer's computer. Similarly, an QuickTime video (.MOV) must be viewed with Apple's QuickTime media player.

If someone tries to view your video and does not have the necessary media player installed on their computer, they will usually be re-directed to a download site when they click the link. At this point, lots of people will just give up and forget about viewing your video. This is especially true if the media player is difficult to find or requires a registration process before downloading.

The Windows format is pretty well covered because the majority of computer users already have the Windows Media Player. Streaming videos formatted in QuickTime (.MOV) or RealMedia (.RM) may have fewer viewers because of the process of the of installing these third-party media players.

Flash Video (.FLA) is also a third party format, but it is the most popular format for streaming video. The media player required for Flash is very easy to download and install, and flash videos are automatically embedded into web pages. This is a big advantage over streaming video which causes the media player to pop up independently of the Web browser, because many people think any kind of pop up is intrusive.

Windows video files can also be embedded into web pages, but this is an option which much be selected during the encoding process.

An alternative to proprietary media players is the use of a JAVA streaming video playback system. This allows a streaming video to be embedded into any web page or e-mail without the use of a streaming server.

JAVA is platform independent, meaning that one format is suitable for any type of operating system. It is already installed on most of the world's computers no matter what operating system they use. This means that JAVA streaming video give you the widest user base of any streaming video technology.

There are several companies which offer Java video streaming with a licensing requirements. Two of these companies are Clipstream and SiteSeer.