No,no no. It's not that simple. I tried watching the feature "100 years of Horror" using both Real Player and Emblaze and there are clear differences. First of all, Real Player is truly streaming, and rarely buffered, but had a very poor picture. Emblaze is apparently quite adjustable in compression and at one extreme is close to streaming, and at the other extreme is like a Quick-Time Movie. The Emblaze movie can be re-run in whole or in part, which the Real version can do.
My connection is 28.8. First I watched Emblaze at 28.8. It buffered a 10% head start, but the compression ratio wasn't high enough and it was playing the data 50% faster than that, so after 30% it stopped while it built up another lead, and so on. The resulting picture was pretty good, and had the curious characteristic that if the picture wasn't moving very much, the quality kept getting better and better. In playing the movie it buffered about 4 times, each for a substantial amount of time.
Then I watched it on Real. It detected the speed of my connection and played at the appropriate speed. The picture quality was much lower, but the movie started faster, and only buffered a couple times, and then only for an instant. It was much closer to real time.
Then I went back to Emblaze and selected 56k even though I am only at 28.8. Obviously there was much more buffering and it took a long time to load, but I did get to download the whole movie and watch it with a very high picture quality.
So... if you need to play in real time, Real is the way to go, though MediaPlayer is probably also good. If you want a quality picture you could go with Quick-Time or Emblaze. But Emblaze is more than that. Emblaze obviously works at a lot of compression rates. Presumably you could increase the compression rate from the rate used at 28.8 and eliminate the buffering. Plus Emblaze doesn't require a special player. And Emblaze works especially well if the picture isn't moving too fast. Therefore Emblaze could be used to play a better quality movie if the user will tolerate the buffering.
But Emblaze has another more obvious use. Go to the AENTV home page and you get banner ads which contain movies. I believe that these are Emblaze movies complete with sound! And these attract more attention (for now) and will have a higher click rate (at least for now) than still ads or even animated ads. And if the ads are designed well with a minimum of motion, the quality will be very good, though they do make the page slower to load.
Carl
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