Communicating encode

摘要

Video-on-demand has been the mysterious Holy Grail of content owners and distributors for at least a decade. With the advent of broadband Internet access and streaming video, the technological building blocks required to make the concept a reality have started to fall into place. But so far we're still mostly in the hype phase, where the ability to play a video signal over a phone line (i.e., a 56K dialup connection) is being trumpeted as the dawn of a brave new era. Truth be told, the quality of dialup video is even worse than what you used to get from an old IX CD-ROM drive. It's not even close to providing a minimally acceptable user experience. And since the vast majority of web-using households access the Internet via dialup, web video for the home market still has a long way to go before it enters the mainstream.