You know most people use the shipping analogy or our technical content writer likes to use a recycling/garbage truck analogy. So let me see what I can do here...
Live video streaming end-to-end is like baking a cake for someone. 🍰
I could give you all the raw ingredients, but transporting exactly the right number of eggs without smashing them and melting the butter is hard and you still have to do all the work yourself when it gets to you. This would be like me trying to send you a huge raw video file, you get to download all the bits slowly and hope it doesn't get corrupted on the way there. This isn't really streaming, but in the end you hopefully get the video. That would be great if you were into a Blue Apron experience but for like Game of Thrones. 👎
Instead, I'm going to collect the raw ingredients (video capture), use what the recipe calls for, your favorite flavor may or may not influence my cake making decisions, but my available raw ingredients sure will. Maybe I'll even use my stand mixer or hand mixer to make the process easier for me as the baker (encoding). You as the cake consumer don't care and can't tell if its hand mixed, stand mixed, or non-mechanically hand mixed, but I can, and after an upper body workout I can get you a cake faster if I use my stand mixer. From there I get to determine cake shape (package), round or square based on which one of my pans I can cover for transport later. But first, I need to bake my raw ingredients (convert/transcode). Baking complete, we wait for it to cool (or maybe its a new fade where we eat molten hot cake, WebRTC & data channels), ice it, then put the foil or lid on the pan (distribute). Then I delivery it, contactless of course. And you eat it immediately because you can't resist (playback).
And then maybe you eat it the next few days whenever you want (Video on Demand, VOD).
There are so many choices and decisions you have to make in the process, some of that is influenced by your end user and the experience you want to achieve at playback and some of that is based on how you captured the video in the first place. Like no matter how hard I try right now, I can't make you a chocolate cake. I have no chocolate powder in the house... but I do have chocolate chips. No matter how much you want 8K delivery, you can't scale up a 4K video camera and it not look like you shoehorned a 4K video into an 8K experience.
I'm a friendly, non-dev, cisgender guy from NC who enjoys playing music/making noise, hiking, eating veggies, and hanging out with my best friend/wife + our 3 kitties + 1 greyhound.
You know most people use the shipping analogy or our technical content writer likes to use a recycling/garbage truck analogy. So let me see what I can do here...
Live video streaming end-to-end is like baking a cake for someone. 🍰
I could give you all the raw ingredients, but transporting exactly the right number of eggs without smashing them and melting the butter is hard and you still have to do all the work yourself when it gets to you. This would be like me trying to send you a huge raw video file, you get to download all the bits slowly and hope it doesn't get corrupted on the way there. This isn't really streaming, but in the end you hopefully get the video. That would be great if you were into a Blue Apron experience but for like Game of Thrones. 👎
Instead, I'm going to collect the raw ingredients (video capture), use what the recipe calls for, your favorite flavor may or may not influence my cake making decisions, but my available raw ingredients sure will. Maybe I'll even use my stand mixer or hand mixer to make the process easier for me as the baker (encoding). You as the cake consumer don't care and can't tell if its hand mixed, stand mixed, or non-mechanically hand mixed, but I can, and after an upper body workout I can get you a cake faster if I use my stand mixer. From there I get to determine cake shape (package), round or square based on which one of my pans I can cover for transport later. But first, I need to bake my raw ingredients (convert/transcode). Baking complete, we wait for it to cool (or maybe its a new fade where we eat molten hot cake, WebRTC & data channels), ice it, then put the foil or lid on the pan (distribute). Then I delivery it, contactless of course. And you eat it immediately because you can't resist (playback).
And then maybe you eat it the next few days whenever you want (Video on Demand, VOD).
There are so many choices and decisions you have to make in the process, some of that is influenced by your end user and the experience you want to achieve at playback and some of that is based on how you captured the video in the first place. Like no matter how hard I try right now, I can't make you a chocolate cake. I have no chocolate powder in the house... but I do have chocolate chips. No matter how much you want 8K delivery, you can't scale up a 4K video camera and it not look like you shoehorned a 4K video into an 8K experience.
👏👏👏👏👏👏. Bravo
Love this!! This is a super cool analogy. 😀
Also, your humor here is so on point — "deliver it, contactless of course..." — haha, oh the times we live in!
And now, I really want cake, haha. 🍰
My bad 🤣