Examining Streaming Media: Hulu.com
July 3, 2008
Well, I have seen some really BAD examples of streaming media and some that were fair. But I have to tip my hat to Hulu.com for providing a service so slickly packaged and entertaining, that it may soon replace TV (in my house at least.)
How Hulu.com streams such high quality media is beyond me.
I will take a guess that Hulu.com is using something similar to the system used by ABC used to broadcast it’s most popular shows like Lost, where video is delivered according to your bandwidth.
I may even speculate that Hulu.com uses some kind of broad P2P grid to distribute content efficiently.
By this I mean that they may spread the broadband load out over a peer-to-peer network, so that anyone who is watching ‘Firefly’ for example, is actually a server for others who wish to watch the same show, sending out small data packets in addition to the packets coming directly from Hulu.com.
Hulu.com gets it’s revenue form commercials which are situated within the content and which I assume are specifically targeted to the user. As new clients come and go, it is a relatively simple thing to slip advertising in or out of the content presented on Hulu.com
Genius!
And the clincher for Hulu.com is that it actually provides compelling popular content (Battlestar Galactica, Arrested Development) as well as ‘long-tail’ content that must have been relatively cheap to license (Alf, A-Team, Highlander.)
This is all speculation however and hopefully by the end of my Streaming Media course at the University of Washington I will understand the platform that Hulu.com runs on.
What I know for sure though is that Hulu.com has a bright future and offers a commercially viable alternative to both TV AND YouTube.
-Kirk
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Sean | July 14, 2008 at 4:33 am
Yes, it’s interesting to know what’s behind the site. Much like google’s superior technology eventually displaced those search engines that came before it, I suspect the architecture behind streaming media will really get tested, with HD, and users growing exponentially.
P2P is definitely the most scalable model, but it will be difficult to apply directly to real-time streaming (since order of arrival is important). However, it could still be valuable in a hybrid model.
Given time, more research can probably reveal more of what’s behind hulu (and others). But it looks like Akamai is used as the content distribution network.