We are often asked why people should pay us for hosting streaming video when YouTube is free. It used to be easy to answer because the quality was so poor on YouTube but that's not so clear cut any more. There are three main issues: 1. Unlike PlanetStream, YouTube give no guarantee of service or [...]

What file type should you use to stream in? This is a regular question I get asked by PlanetStream clients, and an important consideration that can be best answered by looking at your individual requirements and the goals you’re looking to achieve from video streaming. Choosing the file type is important as you want to [...]

A question I’m asked a lot by PlanetStream clients is “How much bandwidth do I need?” Sometimes this question is akin to the old chestnut “how long is a piece of string”, so I’ve come up with some rough calculations to help you along. It all depends on the amount of viewers you’re expecting to [...]

A lot of people are talking about Microsoft Silverlight. Will it challenge the (alleged) superiority of Flash? Here are a few links to fill in some of the gaps. Wiki entry on Silverlight A (not very good) site built using Silverlight Geeky forum discussing the bits that don’t work (most of it?) Any more insights [...]

I receive a lot of questions from customers who want their On-demand videos to be easily accessible for a wide range of clients, family etc. on the Web. As most streaming multimedia files are in one of the three major formats — Microsoft Windows Media, Apple’s QuickTime, or RealAudio/Video – it can be difficult to [...]

The amount of disk space you need to store your streaming media files depends on two things. Firstly the type of file you are using – Real, Windows Media, Quicktime, Flash, mp3, etc. Secondly it depends on the bit rate of the streaming file. The higher the bit rate, the better the quality, the bigger [...]

Most business users of the internet will access the net via a network connection. this means they will almost invariably be sat behind a firewall. We can overcome this by streaming via http protocol which is what your web browser uses. So if you are behind a firewall but can still browse the web, you [...]