After much gnashing of teeth and performance testing we’ve made a switch in how we deliever the videos to your web browser. As we developed Ziddio we wanted to deliever a user experience with features that we ourselves would use (duh!) and it puzzled us that other video interfaces lacked some of these features - like REALLY fast video start times and the ability to jump around to whatever part of the video you wanted to (we hate those “watch until minute 2 for the really good stuff” messages, especially when you can’t just jump to the good stuff) so we built our video player to stream video from our servers.
In short we thought streaming = good (for the non-technies streaming basically means we deliever the video as you see it. Start two minutes into a video, we start by sending you the video information starting two minutes in. The alternative is called progressive download, where if you wanted to start watching two minutes in, the file has download from the BEGINING of the video so you have to wait until the download reaches the two minute point before it starts playing. So in short its super efficient and videos play very quickly)
Well in principal streaming = good, but in practice streaming introduced a whole boatload of headaches - especially from users behind certain types of firewalls and specific network connections. So this past week we’ve swapped out how Ziddio delievers videos from streaming to good ole fashioned progressive downloads. Our tech gurus worked overtime and figured out how to make the transition totally seamless so hopefully you didn’t notice anything (well except those who couldn’t view videos before…you’ll now be able to…well…see the videos so thats an improvement).
