Panelists included Oystein Wright of Mansion Productions; Raffi Vartanian of WorldWideContent; Ali Joone of Digital Playground; Mark Prince of 2much.net; and Jason Walters of Splice Media.
“The trick is to get as much content through the fibers as possible with the technologies available,” Vartanian said.
“We’re still dealing with the same bandwidth issues we had in 1999 or 2000,” Walters added. “We’re still trying to squeeze as much volume as we can through small pipes.”
What’s changed, he said, is the codex used by companies who make delivery technologies, resulting in vastly better picture and audio quality. That is due, in part, to the growing interest in online video from the mainstream, thanks to Google Video, YouTube and others.
The two technologies vying for the lion’s share of adult use are Windows Media, Apple QuickTime and Flash, and each has advantages and drawbacks, according to Prince. Whereas Windows Media is based on Mpeg 4 and delivers a higher quality than Flash, for example, users experience a delay in delivery. Flash, on the other hand, is faster, but the quality is not as high.
“The challenge is how to reduce the delay while maintaining quality,” Prince said.
Digital rights management presents another set of challenges, Wright said, calling DRM a necessary evil.
“There are lots of rules about what you have to put on a file, and sometimes [the rules make it] unclear how to make the user experience a good one,” he said. “Anyone who owns exclusive content should use DRM, but you also want to protect the user experience. You have to find a balance.”
Digital Playground’s Joone looked to the future of content delivery and the emergence of high-definition content, saying that the main issue with delivery of hi-def content on the Internet is drive space. While many of today’s computers might have trouble with hi-def, Joone said content producers should not be shortsighted.
“It’s not about what the preferred delivery method is today; it’s about creating a library that won’t become outdated,” he said. Web operators always have the option to downgrade hi-def content for standard delivery, he added.
One telling fact: Digital Playgound offers trailers in both standard definition and hi-def on it’s site, and has seen a steady increase in users choosing the hi-def versions.