It's a fact: Streaming video is the hot new trend for creating compelling online advertising and marketing campaigns. Why are industries across the board investing in video? The live streaming video is available at this link . Unfortunately, however, the technology for providing wine and cheese through your LAN is not yet at hand. On one hand, high-quality streaming video is no easy task. It involves downloading, decoding and playing video and audio simultaneously, and with no or very limited re-buffering taking place.  One of the most advanced ways of doing online training is with streaming video.

Flash streaming video is a case in point. Before 2004, hardly would anyone have thought of the popularity Flash streaming video is enjoying today in 2007. Since encoding great quality streaming video is an art - not a science, you need to be extremely careful when comparing video quality. As you shop around, don't assume that when a competitor's example video clips are labeled with words such as low, medium and high speed or dial-up, ISDN and broadband , that it means the clips were encoded at 37, 100 & 300 Kbits/second respectively. The reality with streaming video is the reality you would find when producing content for any medium. You get out of it what you put into it.

As this diagram shows, the first step in the process of creating streaming video is to "capture" the video from an analog source such as a camcorder or VHS tape, digitize it and store it to disk. This is usually accomplished with an add-in analog video capture card and the appropriate capture software.