Finding a live stream configuration that works for the average DOM user

I'm still relatively new to Denver Open Media and while I'm still getting to know the site and channel's audience, the first major change I've made to the site has resulted in more negative feedback than I expected. That change was moving from a QuickTime Streaming Server and embedded QuickTime player to a Wowza Media Server and Flash player to display the live stream of channel 56. When I looked at the server logs for the QuickTime streaming server before making the change, the most concurrent users ever watching the stream in the 60 days prior to the change was 4. In July, the live stream wasn't even one of the top 10 pages on denveroprnmedia.org. Now the live stream is second only to denveroprnmedia.org's front page.

July's Top Pages	August's Top Pages

I'll be the first to admit that I need to do more than the small, red debug message when Flash needs to be updated, but the Flash/H.264 technique is quickly becoming the industry standard. Most of the major video sharing/streaming sites (Hulu, YouTube, Blip) already support this, so this is far from bleeding edge.

The same machines that can't watch the stream because they can't be updated to the latest version of Flash probably didn't have a version of QuickTime that supported H.264 either. The codec used in the encoding hasn't changed.

The fact is that more than 56% of denveropenmedia.org users already have a version of Flash that supports H.264...

and almost 80% of our users connect via cable, DSL, or something faster...

...so they should be able to watch the video without losing frames to dropped packets.

Since I was looking at the analytics, I thought I'd share some other interesting numbers. While 62% of denveropenmedia.org visitors are using Windows...

57% are using Firefox or Safari...

The majority of denveropenmedia.org are in fact from the Denver area...

The bottom line is that there was a change that may have required some people to upgrade, the majority already have the browser, plugins, and bandwidth necessary to view the live stream and the change has made it a much more popular part of the site. While I will continue to look into problems with sync, I'm not going to give much thought to users who think that the H.264 Flash configuration is the wrong direction.