Let me start by saying I don’t get MySpace. Maybe I’m too old or maybe I’m just antisocial, but I haven’t found a use for it (other than the requisite ‘keeping-tabs-on-exes’). In fact, seeing some of the stuff (risqué photos, confidential work details, etc) a few younger coworkers have publicly revealed alarms me. Despite me apparently being out of touch, there’s no denying MySpace has huge traffic and is a premiere web destination. Unlike other recent tv-on-web experiments, this one actually has a chance of gaining traction given the stickiness of MySpace — IF Fox moves off their custom player and embeds video directly into Windows Media Player or Flash. Though that would make protecting content and force feeding ads a bit more tricky…
(via TechCrunch)
Both Fox and MySpace already use Akamai to deliver their digital content, and Akamai has all kinds of ways to let their customers control their streaming media. Fear not, those ads will continue to be force fed. :)
I meant ‘control’ as in copy protection, not our ability to manipulate the video – I just updated the post to reflect that.
Actually, I originally understood you to mean copy protection and force-fed inline advertisements.
But you make a valid point… Fox’s current proprietary player does indeed obscure their video content a bit more than if they used a mainstream player like WMP or Flash. After digging around further, it looks to me like the Fox video content on MySpace is actually powered by Move Networks “Quantum” Technology… and it is delivered over LimeLight’s content delivery network – not Akamai’s.
The TV episodes aren’t streamed at all – the player downloads chunks of the video by issuing sequential, byte range specific HTTP GET requests for what look like proprietary Move Networks .qss files. It looks like they slice a single TV episode up into lots of these .qss files, which average around 150K per file. This makes sense, as the end result is that the video is much more cacheable across LimeLight’s network – and much more difficult to grab in-flight in hopes of reassembly offline.
The TeleCrunch article claims that the episodes are available on the web in “high definition.” But the links on MySpace certainly do NOT playback at 1920×1080 or 1280×720. Think it’s just sloppy usage of the phrase “high definition,” or am I missing something?
I’ve found that MySpace is a good place to keep tabs on future exes as well ;)
I think you’ve missed the point of the player Fox is using. Think about it from the broadcaster’s point of view and then read http://willprice.blogspot.com/2006/11/move-networks.html