What is streaming?

[holmcall]

How does one engage it? Now that boxing seems to be turning to it. how can fans follow suit?

[Master]

Streaming means listening to music or watching video in ‘real time’, instead of downloading a file to your computer and watching it later.

With internet videos and webcasts of live events, there is no file to download, just a continuous stream of data. Some broadcasters prefer streaming because it’s hard for most users to save the content and distribute it illegally.

Streaming is a relatively recent development, because your broadband connection has to run fast enough to show the data in real time. Files encoded for streaming are often highly compressed to use as little bandwidth as possible.

If there is an interruption due to congestion on the internet, the audio will drop out or the screen will go blank.

To minimise the problem, the PC stores a ’buffer’ of data that has already been received. If there’s a drop-out, the buffer goes down for a while but the video is not interrupted. If there is no more data in the buffer, it will usually stop and display a message - ’buffering’ - while it catches up.

Streaming has become very common thanks to the popularity of internet radio stations and various audio and video on-demand services, including Spotify, Last.fm, YouTube and the BBC’s iPlayer.

Some services offer different levels of quality for different internet connections.
YouTube, for example, can stream low, medium and high-quality videos to both mobile phone users and broadband users. However, YouTube’s high-quality videos for phones (320 x 240 pixels) have less resolution than low-quality videos for PCs (400 x 226 pixels) because phones have smaller screens.

Most people know that downloading files uses up their bandwidth allowance, which may be capped at a fixed number of gigabytes per month. But what they don’t know is how much bandwidth they use while streaming.

Listening to music can consume about 0.5-1.0 megabytes per minute and watching ordinary YouTube videos can consume about 4-5 megabytes per minute. It can be more or less, depending on the quality.

There are free programs that will measure bandwidth use, including NetMeter, Codebox Software's BitMeter II and FreeMeter Bandwidth Monitor For Windows. Some firewalls and some internet service providers (ISPs) will also tell you the amount of data used.

One drawback with streaming is that there’s one stream per computer - ‘unicasting’. Broadcasters, including the BBC, would prefer to use ‘multicasting’, where everyone listens to the same stream. This would save a lot of expensive internet bandwidth and allow better quality streams. Multicasting is still in development.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/webwise/guides/about-streaming

[Master]

There are some good streaming sites for boxing.

[walrus]

There are some good streaming sites for boxing.

Ya I downloaded the espn app on my phone. Not that they do a lot of boxing but it’s good to catch it when it is on

[smashup]

Do people really not know what streaming is in the middle of 2018?
Fucks Sake 😂

[palmerq]

https://youtu.be/LV0wTtiJygY


...... :S

[holmcall]

Streaming means listening to music or watching video in ‘real time’, instead of downloading a file to your computer and watching it later.

With internet videos and webcasts of live events, there is no file to download, just a continuous stream of data. Some broadcasters prefer streaming because it’s hard for most users to save the content and distribute it illegally.

Streaming is a relatively recent development, because your broadband connection has to run fast enough to show the data in real time. Files encoded for streaming are often highly compressed to use as little bandwidth as possible.

If there is an interruption due to congestion on the internet, the audio will drop out or the screen will go blank.

To minimise the problem, the PC stores a ’buffer’ of data that has already been received. If there’s a drop-out, the buffer goes down for a while but the video is not interrupted. If there is no more data in the buffer, it will usually stop and display a message - ’buffering’ - while it catches up.

Streaming has become very common thanks to the popularity of internet radio stations and various audio and video on-demand services, including Spotify, Last.fm, YouTube and the BBC’s iPlayer.

Some services offer different levels of quality for different internet connections.
YouTube, for example, can stream low, medium and high-quality videos to both mobile phone users and broadband users. However, YouTube’s high-quality videos for phones (320 x 240 pixels) have less resolution than low-quality videos for PCs (400 x 226 pixels) because phones have smaller screens.

Most people know that downloading files uses up their bandwidth allowance, which may be capped at a fixed number of gigabytes per month. But what they don’t know is how much bandwidth they use while streaming.

Listening to music can consume about 0.5-1.0 megabytes per minute and watching ordinary YouTube videos can consume about 4-5 megabytes per minute. It can be more or less, depending on the quality.

There are free programs that will measure bandwidth use, including NetMeter, Codebox Software's BitMeter II and FreeMeter Bandwidth Monitor For Windows. Some firewalls and some internet service providers (ISPs) will also tell you the amount of data used.

One drawback with streaming is that there’s one stream per computer - ‘unicasting’. Broadcasters, including the BBC, would prefer to use ‘multicasting’, where everyone listens to the same stream. This would save a lot of expensive internet bandwidth and allow better quality streams. Multicasting is still in development.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/webwise/guides/about-streaming

fantastic answer