I have largely been in the Streaming Media business for well over 12 years and in that time, there is one major problem with adoption.  It’s damn difficult.  Not really difficult from the perspective of a seasoned internet user, or someone who has been in the Internet world and is very familiar with the concept of media players, browser plugins and all the other bile that comes from the tech elite.  However, it is difficult with respect of how media is consumed by most non-tech people.

Think about the concept of a radio.  How hard is a transistor radio to use.  Find a power button, rotate a dial and presto-chango, radio.  However, if I try to apply this same logic to most internet radio.  Well first and foremost I have to go somewhere, say a website, then two different things can be presented.  Either I get presented with the fact that I lack a plugin called “Flash” to play the media or some other embedded plugin (Anyone remember Windows media player?), I may also get a link to a playlist file that won’t necessarily work with the given applications.

I truly can’t believe that I have watched an industry I have worked for over 12 years in still accept this strange concept.  The game changer is finally right around the corner.  HTML5 is going to finally integrate the concept of streaming into the browser.  Great!  Problem is that no one can agree on exactly how to do this.  Sure we have the <audio> or <video> tag now, but there is no consistent codec out there that covers every different type of browser that exists.  Open source players can’t get on board with proprietary codecs like Mp3 or aacPlus, and closed browsers can’t get on board with Ogg.

The solution is to present both types and let the browser figure it out, however, legacy browsers might no even know what a <audio> tag is.  Harkening back to the concept many IT people dread, upgrades.  So many old world IT divisions still need IE7 or 8 which is simply god-awful.

There is promise though, a new codec by the name of Opus was just completed last Summer, I still patiently wait to see if it truly sees universal adoption.  The only hold out I see is from Apple.  Since, as they claim, there could be patent issues with a lot of Ogg’s legacy visions like Theora and Vorbis.  Will Opus stand up to the test of patents?  We won’t know for sometime, but Microsoft is on board and if they integrate it in IE 11 then perhaps we will see a day when Apple will simply be forced by major forces to accept Opus.

For now my plan is to make it easier on the broadcaster, because, to put it plainly, it shouldn’t be this hard to build a streaming radio station.  I can’t fix some aspects of it, but I think the days of plugins and players is over and reducing that unknown is certainly a good place.  My project Steamcast, will simply remove the need to even worry about a player by taking advantage of what is available to make the listening experience as painless as possible, at the same time, removing the need for a broadcaster having to worry about which player or browser a listener might have.