pgt » web2.0

HTTP Live Streaming

P.G.Taboada — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 07:19:40 +0000

The Iphone OS 3.0 announcements included a new capability: to watch HTTP Live Streaming. Well, I know that there are streaming protocols and streaming servers, and I know that there is something like progressive download that allows us to start watching a movie while it is beeing downloaded.

But what is HTTP Live Streaming? I finally found a nice article goung through the media streaming history (well, for some of us it is lived history…). I picked some facts that I found noteworthy:

HTTP Live Streaming actually does stream content in real time
RTSP streaming failes when it hits against the first firewall, HTTP tunnelling adds too much overhead
The technology behind HTTP Live Streaming was submitted to the IETF as a draft standard (on track to become an RFC)
It looks like Microsofts “Smooth Streaming”, but is not bound to Microsofts Expression Encoder, Microsoft Internet Information Server with a Smooth Streaming extension, and does not require Microsoft’s Silverlight 2 on the client…
It is simple: the content is encoded into an MPEG transport stream and chopped into 10s fragments
It is not an continuous stream, the client asks for fragments as they are needed
It does not require any special server (any webserver can deliver the fragments)

Why should Apple be interested in Twitter?

P.G.Taboada — Wed, 13 May 2009 09:21:18 +0000

Somehow I missed the SMS/MMS thingy. I never understood why people kept sending lots of expensive SMS/ MMS on a daily basis. Well, in the meantime I started using Twitter… And, I must say, I am using it on a daily basis on my iPhone now. Twitter gives me the theme, geolocation or friendship based chatroom right there where I want it – on the go, easy, accessible.

Now we have rumors that Apple is interested in Twitter. Here is a statement I found quite interesting:

“When you consider the number of text messages and how that’s starting to exceed every other type of message, and when you have a company like Twitter that specializes in and sends more text messages than anybody on the planet, and you’ve got Apple with the iPhone, which is one of the best senders and receivers of text messages, then you’ve got to look at the potential,” Safko said.

Let’s wait for the Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in June!

News stream pipelining

P.G.Taboada — Tue, 12 May 2009 17:01:54 +0000

Habe mir heute Yahoo-Pipes angeschaut. Ein sehr mächtiges Tool um Newsfeed-Streams zu verarbeiten. Das ganze wird auch noch visuell in einem webbasierten Editor erledigt.

Habe ein bisschen rumgespielt: es eine wirklich geniale Umsetzung des “Pipe” gedanken. Mit einem Yahoo-Account ist man schnell dabei, und wenn man keines hat kann man sich einen ersten Eindruck mit eines der Filmchen die angeboten werden verschaffen:

Ein sehr interessantes Tool für alle die, wie ich gerade,sich mit dem Filtern von Newsfeeds beschäftigen…