RealNetworks supports a form of multicasting with a
RealNetworks supports a form of multicasting with a control back-channel. This allows full statistics to be gathered from the clients, but has the advantage of multicasting the media data. It is best suited to small audiences; a very large multicast would have problems with the server capacity required to handle the unicast control traffic. On-demand serving On-demand serving is more like running a web server. The viewers choose their own content, and then a fast disk storage array delivers the content, as required, to the streaming servers. Each client has a unicast connection with the server, so the more viewers, the higher the server loading. A popular site will use many servers in parallel. The Internet traffic loading can be balanced across all the servers. The server hardware does not need many facilities: a fast CPU, plenty of RAM, and at least two network-interface cards (NICs). If the server has very high loadings or there are network problems, you will need access by a separate network port for control messages, so always install at least two NICs. The system will be more reliable if the load is spread over several small servers, rather than one large multiple processor server. This also gives redundancy against hardware failure. Inserting advertisements If you are running a commercial site you will want to add advertisements to the content. They can be the same banner ads used on web pages. The alternative is to insert clips into the stream just like a regular television spot. This is called interstitial advertising. The simplest way to place video advertising around an on-demand clip is to top-and-tail the content with preroll (gateway) and postroll ads (bumper) using an SMIL file (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) to play the clips serially. SMIL has a time container that can be programmed with a fixed sequence of media elements. The sequence command is used to place ads before and after clips. The player will run the playlist of content and advertisements as programmed. The viewer cannot step through the playlist manually to jump over the ads. An associated SMIL element, parallel, commands the group within the time container to run together. This ensures that the following clip is correctly prerolled to avoid any glitches as the playlist is running. Windows Media Services offers two ways to deliver advertising and other interstitial material: with either a client playlist or the server-side playlist. The 222 The Technology of Video and Audio Streaming
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