Downloads VS Streaming

4 replies [Last post]

Posted: Fri, 2011-09-02 13:31 Bobby

I am seeing an extraordinary amount of downloads for 3-4 of my videos. Most videos on my site stream at like a 20 to 2 ratio (stream:download) whereas these offending few have a ratio of more like 4:6

These few videos are embedded on pages with the player set up to "click to play". I offer no download links. I cannot understand why they are being "downloaded" at all.

In relative terms most of my site's videos play in lightboxes. Only these highly downloaded few are shown via embedded players rather than in lightboxes.

Something is not right so I did a test.

Seems if I view a page with an embedded player in Chrome, the browser is actually downloading the video in the background whether I click play or not.

There's a flaw in the player and it is an expensive one. I am going to remove the player embeds from these pages and put in clickable images which will launch lightboxes instead as a stop-gap measure.

My bandwidth is running out well ahead of my budget projections because our video is supposed to be only "on demand". I'm not looking too good to the powers that be. :(

Can we negotiate some bandwidth replenishment?

Posted: Fri, 2011-09-02 18:18 remco

We have never seen this before. Can you post a link to where you have a player embed where this happens and if maybe this is some sort of configuration issue?

Posted: Wed, 2011-09-07 09:04 Bobby

I have removed the embedded player from my pages already.

This is where the player was embedded (now there are images w/ links). If you look at the video URLs you will see that those videos have the high download rates.

http://www.cryolife.com/about
http://www.cryolife.com/products
http://www.cryolife.com/international
http://www.cryolife.com/products/synergraft-technologies
http://www.cryolife.com/physician-education

I made the change on Sept. 2nd (replacing the embedded player with links to light boxes using the iframe embed method)

Some stats:
On 8/31- 21 downloads
On 9/1- 16 downloads
On 9/2- 22 downloads
post change
On 9/3- 2 downloads
On 9/4- 8 downloads
On 9/5- 0 downloads (holiday)
On 9/6- 3 downloads

Downloads are still occurring but at a greatly reduced rate since the change. Now the player only displays on demand rather than on page load. Streams are staying consistent.

As I stated, I offer no way to download and with RMTP streaming this should not occur at all.

Are you using HTTP for HTML5 capable browsers? That could explain the downloads.

Posted: Thu, 2011-09-08 05:03 remco

It is indeed the case that HTTP is used for HTML5 capable browsers.

Right now for the HTML5 embed fallback we throw a simple <video> tag. iOS devices will load the beginning of the video in order te determine if the video is actually compatible with the device. This will count as a download. Since it will only download a small amount in order to be able to do that (probably like 100 KB or so), this does not add up significantly to the amount of delivery used.

We plan to do a release next month that will improve how HTML5 plays are tracked (HTML5 views will count as views rather than downloads and we will start tracking engagement and hours viewed for HTML5 content too).

Posted: Wed, 2011-09-14 16:48 Bobby

Thank you. I am sure you can understand that when reading the analytics CSV files that extraordinarily high numbers in the "downloads" column plus seeing packet requests for a video file download that isn't really a download can be alarming.

And confusing.

Downloads VS Streaming

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