Streaming

So lately I have realized that it might be time to change my attitude towards something: Streaming videos vs. downloading videos.

The thing is that I have always considered streaming videos to be of far less value than downloadable videos. This has mainly been due to the fact that the quality of the streaming videos has been low compared to the downloaded versions. And the fact that you can't save a streaming video on your computer - it's simply the whole idea of streaming.

However, recently a lot has happened in the streaming technology and streaming videos can now in many cases compete with regular downloaded videos.

Another advantage to streaming videos is their whole concept - they stream and don't need to be downloaded to play and don't take up space on your hard drive. And especially for huge sites like Brazzers, Premium HD Videos, Reality Kings and others who add several new scenes daily, it makes more sense to watch a scene through streaming than to download it because you most likely don't watch that scene again afterwards. Unless it's an especially great one - in which case you can always just stream it again or simply download it.

The three sites I mentioned above all recently have implemented super high quality video streaming. That is of course the first and foremost important aspect when it comes to streaming - it needs to be great quality! You don't want to see the stream while being frustrated about the poor video quality with lots of compression artifacts and a 400x300 video size. You want the quality to be so good that you don't even consider that this is streaming video. This brings a potential problem given that good quality video streams require large server capacity and lightning fast internet connections.

All this doesn't mean that I think sites should only offer super high quality video streams. I think it should be the main focus for the site, but they should also provide a lower quality streaming version of the content as well as a downloadable version of it. All of the sites I mentioned above do just that luckily. And to illustrate how nice streaming video looks at the year 2011, take a look at the samples below.

Brazzers

This is a standard quality preview of their scenes which is 630x420 pixels. Inside the members area the best quality option is 980x554 pixels.



Reality Kings

Again this is only a standard quality preview. The best quality inside the members area is 960x540 pixels.


Premium HDV

The standard quality sample found below is a 640x400 pixel version. The members area holds 1230x690 pixel versions of all scenes. This is probably the closest you can get to streaming true HD quality video.