I HATE video streaming; copyrights be damned

+0 by Sandlewood B

It is a waste of bandwidth; it is purported as something that preserves ownership and 'copyright' of media that viewers/listeners/readers are easily able to reproduce (i.e. copy). Years ago, I remember students in a dorm continually downloading a file from a classmate's computer until his hard drive died: even with improved technologies, disk-based secondary storage ages with each and every access, no matter how large the cache is-- because the cache is smaller than the actual full usage data size. All of this legal convulsion in order to 'prohibit' and 'limit' users' access to "copyrighted media" on the Internet which in itself has very little worth (some guy falling on his groin; owned privately or by a corporation?).

I have an alternate view of what should be: Hard-linked URL to video which must be downloaded in order to view. No buffering; no wasted time viewing it again later or rewinding only to find out that the ill-programmed web application forgot that it actually had that part 'cached' in memory or (more often forbidden in newer force-propagated software such as Adobe) on disk, and you are forced to wait again as it tries to find the most recent full frame to buffer its CoDec from in order to display the frame you wish to see.

Too many corporations and ISP's are bellyaching and whining about "my precious bandwidth is being abused," but not a single one is putting their head above the din to decry "streaming media" as the culprit. Every single time you see an "embed" option for some video on the Internet, it is wasting bandwidth.

If these people want something to 'preview' their movie, there should be an extremely small version of the file (50x50 pixels?), with horrible audio quality, or a highly compressed JPEG sequence of staggered frames from the movie.

Streaming media, and the support and lack of resistance to the protocols and institution thereof, is crippling ALL private, commercial, and integrated Internet networks:

COPYRIGHTS BE DAMNED; save the Internet; destroy streaming media.