Technological Overview

What is Streaming?

Streaming is the delivery method of video or audio that is constantly received by, and displayed to, the end-user while simultaneously being delivered by the provider. The protocol that Wink Streaming employs, the raw TCP-based protocol RTMP (Real Time Messaging Protocol) maintains a single persistent connection and allows real-time communication of data into 128-byte fragments. This protocol only carries a one-byte header per fragment, thus incurring very little overhead when compared to other common delivery protocols such as HTTP (roughly 20% savings).

Global Point of Presence Network

Streaming content like video is much like buying milk. When you run out of milk the fastest way to get more is to run down to the local corner store. You could go all the way across town, but surely you would hit a traffic jam, red light or accident somewhere along the way that would slow you down in addition to the extra distance you must travel. The larger your vehicle, the more resources you waste and the harder it is to get around obstacles – in short getting a simple jug or milk becomes an unpleasant experience. Online video is much the same as that simple jug of milk – the closer the large video file is and the lesser the congestion, the better the customer experience is going to be. Wink Streaming accomplishes fast streaming though our geographically distributed point of presence servers (POPs) – the internet equivalent of the corner store (that is never out of stock!).

Strategically planted across the globe Wink Streaming has identified and acquired the best data centers located on major internet backbones that met our strictest requirements. While this is a rather complicated and drawn out process we go though, to our customers it means one thing - fastest and smooth delivery of content with no lag or jitter and near instant streaming from the moment your customers hit the ‘play’ button.

Flash Video

The past 10 or so years have seen many different video formats, codecs and players come and go – giving consumers headaches over the simplest question – ‘how do I play this video?’. Well for those of you who have not been following the battle, the winner is clear; Flash Player is the new standard in online video distribution. With H.264 support and High Definition video capabilities up to 1080p it looks like that might stay this way for a long time to come.

Flash Player currently has the largest market penetration (Installed on 98.8% of PC's) of all of the major browser plug-ins and has held this lead for the past 8 years or so. With the introduction of Flash Lite 3 that means much of this content is no longer limited to the PC but also available on Mobile devices and Gaming Consoles. Flash Player is one of the few plug-ins that is freely distributed to Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems and every major web browser.

Managed Solution

With industry-standard H.264 and HE-AAC support and Wink Streaming’s advanced global network you can actually stream more, higher quality video for less money than you could do presently from you own HTTP server using inferior video and audio formats. This coupled with the fact that we offer a fully managed solution means less infrastructure and IT costs on your end and a lot less headaches. This allows you to focus on what you do best, your core business and we’ll take care of our specialty video and audio.