Advantages of Streaming Flash Video

I am a professional video editor specializing in corporate video and occassionally TV commercials. We often post ''review'' videos in Flash format to our website for our clients to check progress, etc. These videos are usually around 3 minutes in length and occasionally reach 20 minutes Trt. We use Adobe Production Premium CS4 which includes Flash CS4. I usually export the videos at the included preset, ''Web Large Widescreen''. The playback is almost instantaneous on most DSL and T1 connections. I use the ''Full Screen'' option button and when the videos are viewed full screen, they look amazing.

Here is the issue:

I have recently created a video for a client that contains text and is approx. 50 minutes in length. The video format is 4x3 and the client wants the transcoded Flash video to display at a 640x480 square pixel dimension. The video plays fine over most DSL connections. It chokes on T1.

Question:

Can streaming Flash video provide better quality and playability for longer duration Web videos?

Could any of you direct me to a chart that compares streaming Flash with the ''simulated'' streaming typically exported from Premiere CS4's Media Encoder?

Advantages of Streaming Flash Video

When you say ''T1 chokes'', what exactly do you mean? If you're talking about the video pausing frequently to buffer, it sounds to me that you've encoded the video at a very high bitrate. I don't do much video encoding, so I don't know what the default settings for the Web Large Widescreen preset are . A T1 connection supports 1.5Mbps, but one needs to remember that other traffic on that t1 line will reduce that capacity.

While streaming video can provide a better user experience in some cases, it cannot improve the viewing experience if the consumer does not have sufficient bandwidth to receive the video in real time or better. What a streaming server can help to do is make deteminations about the consumer's available bandwidth, and serve video from a number of files encoded at varied bitrates.

Advantages of Streaming Flash Video

JayCharles Wrote:

''When you say ''T1 chokes'', what exactly do you mean?''

On my Bellsouth DSL Internet connection at home, the video plays almost immediately. At work on our CeBeyond T1 line the video just sits there for about 10-15 minutes buffering, slowly ratcheting ahead. On the clients T1 at their work, the video buffers for 5 minutes before playing.

JayCharles Wrote:

''What a streaming server can help to do is make deteminations about the consumer's available bandwidth, and serve video from a number of files encoded at varied bitrates.''

This appears to be the main advantage. Rather than going the way of www.apple.com/trailers, where you get three to five different sizes of video to choose from, the streaming option makes that decision for the site visitor.

Thanks