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Streaming to the Apple iPhone, Part 2

Dec 8, 2009 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

AllHipHop

AllHipHop.com is a popular hip-hop website that reaches millions of unique visitors each month. The site features daily news, interviews, third-party video content, and increasing amounts of self-generated content, such as the hit show The Next 48 Hours, which follows an artist for the 48 hours leading up to the official launch of a new CD. I spoke with Derek Frempong, director of technology.

Frempong says that AllHipHop distributes up to 3 million video views a month and that his site contracted with online video platform Kaltura to deliver all streams. Though AllHipHop's mobile initiative is relatively new, it's expected to be a significant growth area because its users are mobile savvy and consume significant quantities of content on their phones.

From a workflow perspective, AllHipHop uploads one file to Kaltura and designates whether the file is targeted for general web use, mobile, or both. Kaltura then encodes the file into the required formats for each delivery mode. The website detects browsers on the fly and automatically pushes all mobile visitors to the mobile site.

The site uses a template from Kaltura that accesses the iPhone's native video player from the browser and avoids the need to produce a custom application, which works for Android phones as well as iPhones. All mobile streams have static data rates, however, and don't adjust to changing bandwidth conditions. AllHipHop will add HTTP Live Streaming and dynamic streaming once they are offered by Kaltura, which Frempong expects in the next few months.

Frempong says that not all of AllHipHop's content is posted to the mobile site and stream duration is generally limited to 5 minutes or less. Still, mobile views already comprise about 2 percent to 3 percent of total views, and Frempong says he expects that to grow quickly in the future.

Eternal Word Television Network

Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) is the world's largest religious media outlet, including TV, radio, Internet streaming, and streaming to iPhones. Through all of its outlets, the network reaches 150 million households in 140 countries with 24-hour-a-day programming including religious programming, movies, children's programming, and talk shows. It is the second largest Catholic website, behind the Vatican. I spoke with Jeff Burson, a senior web developer and online manager at EWTN.

EWTN has been streaming audio and video since 1997. It went live with eight worldwide satellite feeds in 2007 and chose online video platform Multicast Media as a partner. At the time, EWTN also set up a generic mobile site (www.ewtn.mobi) distributing Windows Media audio and video streams of EWTN's live programs to Blackberry and other Windows Media-compatible phones. Those streams are still available and are produced at multiple bit rates, from 16kbps audio only to a 500kbps stream. Table 2 shows the details.

Burson says EWTN's distribution strategy is to make its content available as broadly as possible, but because it's a nonprofit, it doesn't have the funding to chase every distribution fad. Once it became apparent that the iPhone was here to stay, Burson contacted Multicast Media to set up EWTN's iPhone service. Today, it uses Multicast's implementation of Apple's HTTP Live Streaming to distribute a single 240x160 stream at 20fps with a video data rate of 200kbps and audio at 48kbps.

Burson says EWTN's Internet and iPhone audience is diverse. Some viewers watch the Internet or iPhone stream because their cable companies don't carry the EWTN broadcast channel. Others watch the iPhone stream where televisions or computers may not be accessible, such as hospital rooms or exercise rooms.

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