The Effects of Metering Bandwidth
Time Warner Cable has begun a test program of metering subscriber’s bandwidth. If you go over the limit that set for the plan you pay for, you’ll be charged $1/GB. Here’s an AP story about this.
At the highest levels, users will see a 40GB cap.
“The metered Internet has been tried and tested and rejected by the consumers overwhelmingly since the days of AOL,” information-technology consultant George Ou told the Federal Communications Commission at a hearing on ISP practices in April.
How fast can you go through 40GB in one month? I can think of a few ways.
You’d use 1.5GB for a rented or downloaded movie from iTunes or Netflix, each. With players like Roku’s Netflix set-top device, you might watch 4 or 5 movies a month.
It’s easy to use up a few GB watching free, legal TV shows from places like NBC.com, Hulu.com and more. Again - this is legal usage.
I know that I few use a couple of GB playing online games, downloading game demos, or purchasing additional game content (Rock Band FTW), be it PC games or console games using a service like the Playstation Network or Xbox Live. We’re just at the beginning of video on demand services using these consoles.
All that and that’s not even take into account uses like photo sharing, VoIP, Skype, online backup services, YouTube, general web surfing and so much more.
So what’s the effect of this type of system for us higher ed web folks?
We offer a lot of media that can get somewhat large, be it podcasts or video or encouraging alums and prospectives to join our private label social networks. We put PDF course catalogs, video tours and more out there. Should this become an industry trend (and let’s hope it doesn’t), we may need to rethink the way we use new technologies to reach out to people.
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Video Week Day One - YouTube
This week, I’m going to take a look at some of the video hosting options available to IHEs. I’ll be looking at each of them from more of the technical end - production, upload and quality wise.
Let’s start things off with the big fish in the pond: YouTube. I think it’s safe to say they are the top when it comes to online video, and they get the most media attention and eyeballs from prospective students. There are plenty of other resources out there about how to set up your channel, make it pretty, etc. I’ll skip the bits about how to customize your landing page. Here’s the landing page for my college.
From a technical perspective, YouTube will take any format you throw at it. You’re limited to 10 minutes and 100mb per upload. I try to upload as high a quality as I can, since by default they stream some of the lowest video quality, fidelity-wise, not content-wise (though some videos out there are just awful.) You can tweak quality settings in your user prefs, but most users probably haven’t and I don’t think that setting carries across to embeds.
Speaking of embedding your videos, it’s very easy with YouTube, just grab the code and you are good to go.
I mentioned a second ago about quality, and I want to dig into that a little bit more. Here’s an example. I made this video in 2006. We shot with a 3CCD camera so we started with very good quality source video. We edited in iMovie and output to a high quality MOV.
Now, visit this YouTube link and see the quality difference? Go ahead, I’ll wait here. It’s startling, isn’t it?
As far as I can find, you can’t change that embed quality. I can get why - those files are larger and take more bandwidth, but YouTube is doing that conversion for some reason. But, why? I’ll tell you.
The iPhone. Well that’s part of it. Since the iPhone lacks Flash support (for now,) Apple most likely said to YouTube “hey, give us H.264 files!” The iPhone plays videos, so it already has the codecs for that format.
Want to see if your video is available in higher quality? Browse to a video in YouTube that isn’t an embed, and tack this bit onto the URL “&fmt=18“.
One newer thing that’s very interesting about YouTube is their API. They recently upgraded their tools and now offer a myriad of ways to use content inside YouTube to create your own mini-YouTube. You could easily create a video portal of videos about your institution or allow users to upload videos through your site and into YouTube and become part of your portal. The API is pretty interesting and there are some definite opportunities for IHEs here.
Despite some of the quality issues, putting your school’s videos in YouTube is a no-brainer. It’s easy, accessible and best of all, free.
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