Mumbai: Striving for retaining the browsers attention is a never ending job. In an attempt to devise better and better communication, web designers quickly resort to streaming media. While streaming media definitely scores over boring text, are you sure that the eyeballs have the patience to wait until your streaming picutres unfold themselves to convey the full story. With a multitude of offering the web surfer is more likely to wander away to another site, than have the patience to see what you want to say. In todays fast world, everyone is crushed for time, slow webs are quick pass-overs. And if you are paying a hefty check to your web designer you need to know, how long will Internet users wait for a site's streaming-media files before they bail? Alternately is your designer capable of devising faster delivery. Given the need for measurement and evolution of a standard, Keynote Systems hopes to answer that question with the first-ever streaming-media performance index.Once the concept of measurement and feedback is in place, designers strive to give their best to improve the performance. "When we put out our performance index, Web site performance quality doubled in two years," says Keynote product manager Matt Parks. "Our newest index will help improve streaming performance."
In order to arrive at a rating, Keynotes measurement computers collect a number of streaming statistics. The data collection covers buffer and frame rates and the number of interruptions in the stream during the play. Keynote currently measures performance through RealPlayer. But soon it would be adding Window Media Player services. Streaming files are scored on a scale of 1 to 10, wherein 10 represents a near-DVD-quality stream. The overall quality rating is derived from a number of factors, including the encoded complexity of the stream and the quality with which that stream is actually delivered. With the current state of Internet technology, a rating of 6 is the highest achievable score, according to Keynote. What this rating means is perfect delivery of a 300Kps video stream that delivers 20 frames per second.
Keynote's inaugural streaming index contains performance data on 20 broadcast and corporate sites across four market categories: audio e-commerce, financial audio, broadcast radio and cable television. Companies were chosen based on their visibility and on traffic levels reported by Media Metrix. Bloomberg Radio, CBS MarketWatch, Weather.com and Net heavyweight Amazon.com were among the sites to make the cut.
A few selected themes have better appeal through the streaming media. The modeling lingerie is a strong contender. Around 2 million people are estimated to have tuned in for a 15-minute broadcast of scantily clad Victoria's Secret models parading on a Paris catwalk in May. The number had doubled from the figure for a similar event in the earlier year.
The streaming media is a very important brick in the web design, especially if you consider that in the US some 30 million people access one form of streaming content or another video or audio. In comparative terms, figures for India are not readily available. But as the fight for the eyeballs continue, the demand for rating services is bound to emerge and grow stronger by the day.
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