Hi there,
As people have mentioned, this is a tricky question because it
requires not only freezing the Internet at a moment in time, but also
assessing what is meant by "streams". I consulted with my friend who
is a high level [and unbiased] technologist at Real Networks who had
this to say [my apologies if you already know some or all of this]...
"1) The question as asked is unknowable in that the answer "how many
streams
are on the Internet" will vary every moment and can have multiple
meanings. Some background in streaming media is required to
understand this.
When a user clicks on the URL of a piece of streaming media content, a
session is initiated between the media player and the media server.
In the parlance of the industry, each concurrent client connection is
referred to as "a stream," so a single piece of content--say a live
radio broadcast--could have between zero and thousands of concurrent
users and we might view this as "one stream" (the single broadcast) or
"5000 streams" (the number of concurrent users). But it's even more
complicated if what you want to get at is the number of users, because
you may have, say, "100 streams" in use at all times, but listeners
may drop on and of over the day, so in the case of the radio
broadcast, the "100 concurrent streams" could represent thousands of
unique users over a period of say 24 hours.
2) So what is knowable or at least estimatable? There are multiple
metrics that are collected which can suggest the scale and growth of
streaming media as, well, a medium.
Selecting the proper question to ask and answer will of course depend
on what use you have for the answer. In general, only estimates can
be made. Why? Because by its very nature, streaming media (like the
Internet) is highly decentralized and content exists on hundreds of
thousands of servers, some small, some big, spread over the globe.
And while we might get an approximation of the number of web pages by
looking at the universe that Google scours [as I believe watcher did,
below] there currently exists no such data for streaming media (though
check out singingfish)."
SIDENOTE: this refers to singingfish.com which came out with a press
release in December 2000 saying that they had and index that
"currently delivers access to more than six million indexed streams, a
number that is expected to reach eight million by year’s end."
http://www.singingfish.com/release12_12.html
"Neilsen NetRatings and MediaMetrix are two companies that attempt
estimate streaming media usage but there are issues with how each
company collects data. For example, the RealPlayer is the default
player for AOL, yet because of the way data collection is done and the
idiosyncrasies of the AOL network, reports of RealPlayer reach
typically don't include the AOL player base, which underestimates the
amount of streaming media being consumed.
The common questions are:
Q: How many streaming media websites are available on the Internet?
A: Estimates vary and should be treated as estimates, but publicly
reported data from RealNetworks based on a January 2002 SingingFish
Web Sample estimates that there are nearly 60,000 unique web sites
with RealAudio & Video (and each web site likley contains multiple
pieces of content) and just under 20,000 unique web sites with
WindowsMedia content. They don't report QuickTime data, but we can
plausibly estimate that worldwide there are probably ~100,000 sites
with streaming media
Q: How many hours of streaming media content are available?
A: For the same reasons as above, this is unknowable, but RealNetworks
reports about their own format that "millions of hours of new content
are created each month" so adding the other formats, well, it's
probably still "millions of hours of content." Not precise, but
indicative of the magnitude of the medium."
He concludes by saying "There is no publically available (eg free)
data available on global streaming usage." [as opposed to US usage
which is reflected in the Arbitron report that I read]
So, in summary, based on singingfish.com's PR and the above summary, I
think a confident guesstimate [assuming that streams stay constant,
linkable and accessible] would be in the 50-100 million streams range,
but again that is a shot in the dark. If you'd like to contact
singingfish for their best estimates, they can be reached here:
http://www.singingfish.com/contact.html
I'm sorry this isn't more definitive, but sometimes knowing why a
definitive answer is difficult can be part of the answer to a
question. Please submit a request for clarifying information if you'd
like more [or different] detail.
Thanks for writing.
jessamyn-ga |
