Flix eliminates the need for QuickTime, Real Player, and Windows Media Scott Manning January 14, 2002

Flix is a gift from God. For $99.00, you have the ability to encode digital video into Flash and set it to stream over pre-determined Internet connections.

If you didn't catch what I just said, then here it is in a bit plainer English:

In the past, if you wanted to show video over the Internet, you had limited options. You could have the user download the entire video and then watch it. This is lame because no one wants to wait for anything to download nowadays. Not only are people impatient, but videos also tend to be MBs in size.

Your other option is to stream the video. This means playing the video while it's downloading. This is a very revolutionary idea. The only problem is that the user has to have a streaming video player. There are currently three major players that people will most likely have: QuickTime, Real Player, and Windows Media.

As of December 2001 the percentages for each of these among Internet users were:
- Windows Media Player: 69%
- Real Player: 51%
- QuickTime Player: 35%

Source: NPD Online survey-Conducted December 2001

Your best chances are with Windows Media Player, but what about the other 31% of the people? What is typically done is sites will provide three versions of their streaming video in Windows Media, Real Player, and QuickTime formats. A good example of this method in action is CNN.com. All of their videos are in those three formats. That means CNN.com has to make three different versions of the same video.

How hard is this? How expensive is this? Read on.

The past suffering woes of developers:
Getting people to download a player is inconvenient and waiting for several megabytes to download is just a pain. The user has to decide which player to download. There are three to choose from, and for those who don't know anything about them, this can be very frustrating. Then the user needs to install it. This whole process can take between 4 and 45 minutes depending on the user's connection and computer speed. All that time taken up just to see your video.

Each one of the big three also requires publishing software and server side software in order to set up for streaming, which costs more money.

The Wildform Flix solution:
As opposed to this mayhem, Flix simplifies the process into a friendly package. The encoding software is a one-time fee of $99.00. No server side software is required. The only requirement is that the user has Flash. How many people have Flash? The latest stats show that over 98% of the browsers out there already have Flash installed.

So rather than installing various media players on a user's computer, installing server side software, creating three formats of the same video, getting frustrated, confusing your users, and shooting yourself in the foot - companies are now empowered to encode the video into Flash to begin streaming immediately when the user clicks to view the video.

Very easy to use:
Using Flix is a piece of cake. It's just a matter of selecting your video, determining the connection you wish to stream over, and then clicking "encode". Flix does the rest. There are pre-sets for connections already set up. If you prefer to make your own pre-sets, you can do that as well. Flix allows you to choose your sound quality, frame rate, video quality, frame size, and more.

Scottmanning.com has been using Flix since it was first introduced. To date, this product has saved the company thousands of dollars in expenses. Many developers have been praying for an alternative for streaming video over the Internet and the gods at Wildform have answered their prayer for a mere 99 bucks.

Related Links:
Offical Flix Website