We’ve all been to YouTube a few times and have accepted video content as part of the internet these days. News sites publish their TV content on the web, and even shows or whole movies can be watched online in some places. Live webcam chats have also been offered by a few major community sites.
But with videos and webcam feeds becoming a normality for the user, smaller sites and business were left out unless they were syndicating YouTube content, an option not leaving a very professional impression to a websites visitor.
High bandwidth cost for streaming video are only part of the reason for the low popularity among webmasters. While it is possible to stream static video from a webserver within certain limits, live video or webcam contents require an application server to do so. Having to stream the video from the beginning up to the desired part for seeking makes webserver streamed video tedious for some tasks and even more expensive in bandwidth cost.
A browser has no video capabilities and requires a plugin to play movies or display cam streams. Currently only Adobes Flash Player has the video capabilities and the installation base to be a feasible client technology for this task. However, the player and the protocols it uses are closed source and for a long time have only been known to Adobe. This enabled Adobe to be the only provider of a server side streaming solution. Unfortunately the price segment of the Flash Media Server is a painful one for smaller businesses and completely unreachable for hobbyist webmasters. This made the video market especially for live webcam streams big boys turf.
The first to break this monopoly was the media server Wowza, which too is a commercial project. While offering some interesting license options for sites to add some smaller video features, building a full fledged video or webcam chat site with Wowza does not come cheap either.
As bandwidth cost declined some sites have started to offer video streamed from a webserver without the seeking abilities of a media server. It wasn’t too pretty, but it worked. Live webcam video in chats and communities however remained a privilege of the big businesses. Especially the community chat market had been dominated by very few companies.
Not even three years ago a new open source project named “red5” started to be the first to offer a free server for streaming video and remoting, opening the door for enthusiasts and low budget startups in an until then fairly closed market. While the server is still in an alpha stage, it has been used for quite a few live projects already, ending the lack of innovation in this market. It is capable of far more than just playing video files or streaming and recording webcam video. It has full AMF support and shared objects, providing the base to create rich interactive multimedia applications such as chats or even games.
Webcam chat sites and video communities suddenly became very affordable to build and many have popped up in the near past. It is always interesting to follow the explosive development of a niche, when new open source software shifts the borders.