Viewfinder: A New Way to Share Video

Napster is disappearing in our rear-view mirrors, but during its rise and fall, it ignited a fire that cannot be extinguished. Napster popularized a "peer-to-peer" system for people to share audio files over the Internet. Now it appears that peer-to-peer video sharing may soon become a reality. Will it suffer the same fate as Napster? If it survives, it may become the dominant means by which we share the videos we make with the world.

Distributing and sharing video via the Internet is not new. Although it has been exciting to consider sharing video quickly and inexpensively, many TV viewers don't consider anything less than VHS quality worthy of the phrase "Living Room Quality Video" (LRQV). The reason Internet video has looked so bad is that videographers and Web masters have been compressing it for delivery through low bandwidth connections. To make video "stream" at 56kbps or slower, or even to allow it to download reasonably quickly at these speeds, we have had to compress it greatly. Doing so has seriously compromised its quality.

We can now, however, offer less-compressed versions of our videos on the 'Net. Whether using the current proprietary streaming video codecs or the industry standard MPEG-4, we now have the ability to deliver LRQV to our broadband …

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Matthew York | January 2002

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Viewfinder: A New Way to Share Video

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