nagano wrote:Interesting. So I take it GoGameGuru will continue to offer the streaming service after they have launched theirs? Will there be any difference? Also, when the quality is up to 720p, will the stream also be 16:9?
The short answer is, that's our plan, but I can't guarantee it will be possible right now. When we first started planning this last year, we intended to provide the live stream at three quality levels: 240p, 480p and 720p (in 1280x720 - 16:9 format). We were envisioning that some people would eventually want to watch it on their TV too, and 720p is important from that perspective.
The media server server sends you one of those three streams based on your device's hardware capabilities, and available bandwidth. It can also switch you between them seamlessly to resolve lag problems, as long as all three streams have been encoded properly. So the actual quality you get depends on your internet connection and what you're watching it on. It won't always be 720p for everyone.
Basically it's a setup which makes sure you always get the best quality video you can support while also reducing lag/choppiness in the playback. It's called 'adaptive bitrate streaming'. We've tested it, but we don't have have it working in production because that will involve setting up some physical hardware in Korea to encode the live video and upload it to our media server.
Now that Baduk TV's new server is in testing, there's another option for us to source the stream from that server directly, because the quality is a lot better than before. This approach would reduce some of Go Game Guru's costs, but it also means we could lose control over the encoding to some degree. If we choose that option, and they don't support up to 1280x720 in their stream, there's no way for us to magically increase the quality ourselves. You can take a high quality video stream and encode it as described above, as long as there's some data you can afford to throw away, but obviously you can't go the other way.
At the moment we're waiting for CJ (the TV company that owns Baduk TV) make a final decision on how they want to price the live stream and how they want to encode the video on their media server. Both of us are looking at the data from the beta services to get an idea about how long people watch Baduk TV for each week on average and what the bandwidth costs for that are. They're very busy at the moment, so it will take a few more weeks, and we'll make our decision after that.
My view (as I've said elsewhere on L19) is that people are always going to pirate things like this, so I believe it's better to spend a little bit more money and provide a much higher quality service for the people who want to pay for quality. Because you can't compete with pirates on price.
What do other people think about this? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.
kivi wrote:Btw. I am sure they can edit that html page if they feel too many people are using it. It's not like you linked directly to the stream or anything.
Which is what they did last Monday. You'll notice that the old link now redirects you to the official page I posted earlier. I guess I obviously didn't explain it very well, but my point was just "please don't cause unnecessary problems for their IT team and the people who are involved in testing", because there are plenty of other places where you can watch it for free at the moment anyway. It just wastes someone's time and slows things down. It seems that Kusto is going to be furious with me no matter what I say now and he appears to be waging a one person PR campaign against Go Game Guru. Certainly I could've been clearer and more tactful in the first place, and I'm sorry about that. Younggil and I have been working on this for a long time now and some days we wonder why we bother when someone always seems to be attacking us about something
. I know logically that people with something bad to say are usually louder and it's impossible to make everyone happy, but still...
Sorry if I came off as confrontational, that was not my intention. I misunderstood a post on BadukTV's Facebook page about those Youtube videos, and thought they were announcing an on-demand service.
like i said, if theirs is cheaper i will be buying from them direct. i am not your enemy, so it would be nice if you stopped adding me to your rants. 
the link comes from the source file on the website baduktv.kr