05-03-2010, 08:36 PM
Bandwidth is a measure of how much data you can transfer per second. In other-words it is the speed of your connection, so if something requires too much bandwidth, you may not be able to play it back smoothly over your Internet connection.
By reducing the bandwidth while still maintaining good quality, you can provide an Internet TV service to a large audience of users online even if those users don't have a very fast connection. Conserving bandwidth is also very important because it costs you (the provider of the content) a lot to provide all that bandwidth (or outsource to a company who can). Keep in mind that unlike a traditional TV service, you have to provide an individual stream to each viewer, so it costs you more and more every time someone else views the content.
VP8 was recently acquired by Google, who is expected to announce very shortly that they will be releasing the codec to the public for free use. If this happens, VP8 may become the new online video standard (instead of H.264) because there are no licensing costs and VP8 allegedly provides the same or better video quality using the same or less bandwidth that H.264 requires, making VP8 an ideal solution.
By reducing the bandwidth while still maintaining good quality, you can provide an Internet TV service to a large audience of users online even if those users don't have a very fast connection. Conserving bandwidth is also very important because it costs you (the provider of the content) a lot to provide all that bandwidth (or outsource to a company who can). Keep in mind that unlike a traditional TV service, you have to provide an individual stream to each viewer, so it costs you more and more every time someone else views the content.
VP8 was recently acquired by Google, who is expected to announce very shortly that they will be releasing the codec to the public for free use. If this happens, VP8 may become the new online video standard (instead of H.264) because there are no licensing costs and VP8 allegedly provides the same or better video quality using the same or less bandwidth that H.264 requires, making VP8 an ideal solution.