Video Streaming par excellence.

Specto Design has been providing streaming video solution for websites since the technology was available and has proven to deliver the fastest possible start time and quality ratio for your website.

As always there is a collection of different standards and formats for video streams available: Windows Media, RealMedia, Quicktime, MPEG (MPEG-4) and Macromedia Flash. All technologies and formats are delivering nowadays more or less what they promise so choosing the right format depends on your viewers. You want to choose a format which is widely installed on your visitor's browser. It is called a plug-in, anybody needs to have it in order to view online movies, videos or animated content. And most users have either one or the other plug-in already installed. To reach the broadest consumer base, we encode all online movies into Flash which 99.7% of all browsers have already installed. (YouToube and Google Video are using this technology) For the few out there not having the plug-in installed we make it easy to automatically upgrade in a few seconds.

Progressive Download
Progressive download is what is mostly referred to as streaming video. It is the most widely adopted low cost solution on small business websites. It mimics the way actual streaming works for no cost. When properly compressed and encoded it will start fast to play and the quality can be stunning. We recommend this solution for low to medium traffic websites and small to medium video clips up to 2-3 minutes. The benifit is you can provide online video from your existing hosting package and no further costs occur. See examples of video compression and streaming for companies such as: Animal Attractions TV , Guerrilla Docs.

Streaming
True streaming has no start delay at all and will only transmit the data required for the next few seconds to play. Additionally your movie or video has no length limit and you could even stream live events. However this solution requires a dedicated server with software providing this capability. Licensing fees and higher hosting costs will occur. See examples at CNN or BBC for streaming video.