Full widescreen videos, better audio than standard iTunes downloads, and it’s all free – is this the future of online video?
Online music-video website Movideo went live today, bringing 2500 high quality music videos, including full widescreen playback, searching, playlists, for free - and a whole lot of questions about broadband caps and speeds in Australia.
Unlike YouTube, the service offers full-screen 16:9 playback up to 720x405 and audio bitrates up to 192K. The result is impressive – it’s not DVD, but it’s a step up from YouTube. Full widescreen is slightly pixelated, but there’s not a lot of jerkiness if you’re on a decent connection.
It's not full-HD, but the company is hyping that possibility in the near future, with managing director Tony McGinn saying full-HD requires 2.2Mbps.
"We're at 1.5Mbps now and I'd like to think it won't be too long before we get there," McGinn said.
Movideo’s secret sauce is a proprietary flash player, designed specifically with high bandwidth connections in mind. The site is also using Akamai servers, and
ideally you’ll be downloading via Australian servers and not from the US. When you drop down to a window-view, the resolution is fantastic, but fast forwarding or rewinding within the stream can be a little difficult because of buffering.
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| Browsing music videos by mood or theme |
You can navigate for songs by standard artist, song and genre types or in an interesting spin by mood.
While the site's free, you have to watch ads. We were told to expect an average of 15 seconds of commercials for every 10 to 12 minutes of video playback (or 3 songs), but we found it be a little different in practice. As you shuffle through the videos, you're subjected to ads no matter how much of the 3 songs you watch. We're also petty sure that most people may get a little annoyed with having to watch the same old commercial over and over again in quick succession (as we did). Still, we were impressed by the speed and video quality.
The big question is what this will do to your download quota - especially if you're using Movideo's "Super" 1.5Mbps stream. Certainly, Movideo is aware of the issue: "It comes down to your ISP doesn't it?" said managing director Tony McGinn, adding that "increasingly what people are moving to is all-you-can-eat." If only.