Bit Gravity is a flash based service for hosting and streaming prerecorded videos over the Internet, as they call it, a “video delivery network,” available live and on demand. In more layman’s terms, it is a bit like a High Definition YouTube, and apparently unlike some others, you can pause, skip, rewind or restart Video on Demand or even live streams. In that way, it’s like TiVo on broadcast television, but over the World Wide Web.
It “broadcasts” in high quality, but can be custom set by each individual viewer to suit their available bandwidth, as well. End users, or viewers, have had good things to say, and seem pleased with the service overall. They also apparently appreciate how the reliability compares; some other such services have been dealing with outages, while Bit Gravity has dedicated nodes on four continents to help prevent that.
It is designed to play smoothly, not to have cache misses or the clunkiness of some other video stream sources (no buffering or freezing), as well as being scalable and fault tolerant. They offer a free, easy to set up flash player, although an end user does not need to download anything to watch videos. The player has an auto-detect feature to determine and set the best bandwidth usage for each user. The host can use low cost, “off the shelf” equipment and bandwidth, keeping setup costs low. Specific costs are, unfortunately, difficult to find, but one should shop around for oneself anyway, and prices are never set in stone.
One drawback is that BG does not appear to have a chat function included, unlike some competitors. So, others have had to use things like IRC in conjunction, or do without the chatroom. For many that is not an issue, some have their own pages for interactions, others are not interactive at all.
From Bit Gravity’s website, “Since its launch in 2008, television networks and Web publishers have relied on BG Live to broadcast nightly news, political conventions, presidential speeches, and President Obama’s inauguration.”
Perry Lawrence has been in video production for over 20 years and has produced, shot, and/or edited videos for companies like Merck, Maxwell House, Nickelodeon, P&G, Ogilvy & Mather, IBM, and many others.
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