Broadband TV

In the last issue of Ariadne I explored available streaming video on the web (Tiny TV, Ariadne issue 22, December 1999), looking at the phenomenon particularly according to the geographic and subject distribution of resources.

Things are moving very fast: by the time the article was published the version of RealPlayer (G2) had been replaced, and my written map of available resources was much narrower than the range of materials which I knew to exist. Many more films and TV shows are available, mostly at cable modem speeds of transmission, and a number of servers appear to have stopped broadcasting, at least from the addresses which were valid and active in December 1999.

Most of what I explored was lowband: video streams arriving at rates between 8 kilobits per second, up to 60 kilobits per second. These are services which (by and large, with occasional pauses to replenish the buffer) can be received and played adequately via a 56k modem on a computer with a greater than 100khz chip. Some items listed in the article however, particularly the film resources, come in at up to 250 kilobits per second. I included these because they were available resources, though not every reader of the article would be able to play the streams.

The Tiny TV article was written in November, and before it was completed I became aware of a number of servers which were distributing broadband streaming video, at speeds in excess of 300 kilobits per second, and sometimes well over 400 kilobits per second. These were not included in the article, partly because of pressure of time, and partly due to a delay caused by some of the streams arriving on port 554, which is one which, here at least, was closed by default. If you have a machine and a network connection capable of handling these higher rate bitstreams (ISDN, cable modem access, T3 connection, etc), but get an error message saying that the port is closed, you will have to ask your system administrator to open the port.

The quality of these transmissions is very high. The default window size is around twice what was enjoyed in the Tiny TV experience, and the window size can often be doubled again without the image becoming unpleasant to watch. Full screen display is just a bit too much, and your computer is not likely to handle the screen redraws necessary, unless it is top of the line. I used a two year old 233 mhz Pentium II, which worked fine with the fastest streams, with the screen window set at 200 per cent.


For the purposes of this article, broadband is defined as anything streaming at a rate in excess of 56kbs. The fastest available I have seen so far is 700kbs. Everything above 56kbs is broadband, since ordinary modem users will not be able to see the streams as intended. So 56kbs is a reasonable definition of where broadband starts. Some items are available at various speeds from 20kbs up to 250kbs, so users interested in broadband should not neglect the lowband listing, since what you are looking for might be there. No items listed arrive faster than 420kbs. I've listed only items which seem reliable and which come up fairly fast. Anything which is intermittent or slow I've omitted from the lists.

Most of what is available at these higher speeds is either commercial film and television (of a certain vintage), or music video (usually modern). There is also some academic material of very high quality. It doesn't make much sense to make news programming available in broadband (not at the moment at any rate), so there isn't much of that around. But there is some. Most of the material comes from a handful of servers, mostly based in the United States. The categories used are as follows: Broadband : Europe; North America; South America; Asia; Middle East; Africa; Drama; Archive Television; Other Educational Resources; Financial Services; Religious Broadcasting; Sport; Commercial Film; Art Film; Music. Lowband follows the same arrangement, with the addition of a 'miscellaneous' section. The coverage in this article is uneven, since I don't have unlimited amounts of time to survey available content and to check the reliability of links. I haven't included as many commercial films as I did in the last article, but by following up the addresses of the main listings you should be able to find these easily enough. Where I haven't found anything worth mentioning in a particular category, I've linked back to the Tiny TV article in issue 22, and/or to the Broadband/Lowband section of this article, as appropriate.