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Video Streaming on Leading News Web Sites Hits Its Stride, Says Keynote

In a Tight Race, ABCNEWS Gets Top Score for Stream Availability; BBC Noticeably Behind in Stream Quality

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 11, 2004--Keynote Systems (Nasdaq:KEYN) sharp

by John Davis 02 Learn how to take your video file from your hard drive, create a streaming media file and then post it to a Web site.

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Streaming video on the most popular news sites has reached new levels of reliability and quality, according to a study conducted by Keynote Systems (Nasdaq:KEYN), The Internet Performance Authority(R). The results of the Keynote News Video Quality Study are being presented today at Streaming Media East by Shai Berger, general manager of Keynote's Streaming division.

Learn how to take your video file from your hard drive, create a streaming media file and then post it to a Web site.

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Of the seven sites measured, all achieved availability scores of 98% or better for their top video stories over a two-week period. Furthermore, the streams on all sites except BBC had an average grade of A+ for StreamQ(TM). StreamQ is Keynote's proprietary metric which provides an accurate measurement of overall stream quality based on connect time, buffer time, and rebuffer time; three important streaming measurement criteria that affect an end user's perception of the quality of the stream.

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Keynote's study is particularly timely given the recovery of online advertising revenues. Advertisers paying to sponsor streaming media need assurance that the brands they are paying to advertise on have created enough loyalty with quality offerings on their Web sites to keep the audience coming back. The study makes clear the need for Web sites offering streaming as an important component of their overall offering to monitor their streams in order to assure a consistently positive streaming experience for site visitors.

An IP address is a number automatically assigned to your computer whenever you are browsing the Web. Web servers, the big computers that "serve up" Web pages, automatically identify your computer by its IP address. When Site Visitors request pages from the Site, our servers log the Site Visitors' IP addresses.

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"The dramatic improvements in quality that we have seen over the past 2 years are no coincidence. They are a direct result of the increased focus that news organizations are placing on their streaming offerings," said Shai Berger, general manager of Keynote's streaming division. "The number of sites offering extensive news video has increased dramatically and Internet users have become aware of their choices. In turn, the news sites have become aware that they need to ensure that their visitors receive a consistently high quality experience. This means expending effort on good site design, timeliness of content and -- the focus of this study -- streaming quality." cameras
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The Keynote News Video Quality Study was conducted using Streaming Perspective(R), Keynote's industry leading streaming measurement service. Streaming Perspective measures, compares and assures the performance of audio and video streams, diagnosing performance problems before they impact the end-user. panasonic
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Streaming Media Comes of Age iseries
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Early last year Forbes reported, "every new medium has its defining moment, and the current Iraqi conflict will be the event that validates the Internet's streaming news media." This statement seems to have been borne out by a recent study from Accustream Research, which states that streaming media registered strong growth in 2003 with total streams up by 104% to 7.8 billion. In terms of popularity, news captures 28 percent viewing share, second only to music videos at 33 percent. Some 78% of video streams served were viewed at broadband rates. information technology
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"Broadband users at work and home are driving growth in streaming media," said Paul Palumbo, director of research at Accustream. "Whether content is accessed through free or ad-supported sites, people are watching and listening more often and for longer periods of time." 180gxp
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The Results security
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The streams for the top stories on each of the participating sites were measured using Keynote's standard methodology. Key statistics such as availability, connect time, buffer time and bitrate were then aggregated from all the streams for each site during the period of the study. StreamQ grades were also assigned to each stream based on the connect time, buffer time and rebuffer time. The results are based on the two week period between April 24 through May 7 during which Keynote measured 2441 streams from seven sites: ABCNEWS, BBC News, CBC News, CBSNEWS, CNN, MSNBC and FOXNews. virus
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ABCNEWS showed the most dramatic improvement with an average of 99.8 percent availability and an average StreamQ grade of A+ compared with their results from 2 years ago: 97.11 percent availability and StreamQ of B+. All the news organizations measured this year performed well and achieved scores between 99.9 and 98.9 percent for average availability. Only BBC News lagged considerably behind for quality with a StreamQ grade of C+. This low grade was a result of excessive buffering which meant that users on average, had to wait 18 seconds for a BBC video stream to begin. In contrast, FOXNews had the fastest average start-up times, with streams starting around 1.7 seconds after the initial click. thinkpad 600
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The entire study will be available on May 25th. Interested parties may sign up to receive the report at http://www.keynote.com/sbl_forms/streaming_survey. The 2003 study conducted by Streamcheck, prior to Streamcheck's acquisition by Keynote in July 2003, may be viewed at http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=8413. The 2002 Streamcheck study can be found at http://www.streamcheck.com/sc-newsvideostudy.pdf. thinkpad 390x
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How Keynote Measured thinkpad x20
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Keynote is the established leader for benchmarking the performance of Internet applications including streamed media. This year's study examined the quality of streaming video from ABCNEWS, BBC News, CBC News, CBSNEWS, CNN, FOXNews and MSNBC using Keynote's world class Streaming Perspective(R) measurement service. laptops
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The study focuses on the "leading" video streams of each site, more specifically, the top 5 video streams presented on the front page. During the survey period Keynote scans the pages of each news site every 5 minutes and extracts the top 5 stories. Each stream is measured 10 times per hour for as long as it remains in this "leading" section. Measurements are taken from Keynote's international network of measurement computers in 12 cities. The key questions that The Keynote Online News Video Quality Study attempts to answer are: laptop battery
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1) How reliable, in general, are these sites as a source of timely news video? microsoft
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2) How good -- and consistent -- is the streaming experience? laptop computer
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3) What are the differences in quality and reliability among news sites? notebooks
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Stream Quality or StreamQ is displayed as letter grades from A+ down to F that indicate the amount of time a user had to wait or experience interruptions ("Frustration Time") versus the time actually spent enjoying the content. In this way customers can rank the end user experience quantitatively. hard drive
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About Keynote Streaming Perspective gateway
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Streaming Perspective is a world class streaming measurement service featuring a real-time Web interface that organizes streaming data so users can quickly understand daily or weekly trends, spot common problems with streaming infrastructure, start and stop tests on demand for powerful diagnostic work and drill down to view packet statistics, trace routes and error codes for each individual measurement. software
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Streaming Perspective also offers a self provisioned Diagnostic Service that allows the user to control testing through a web interface. Self-provisioning puts a powerful tool in the hands of customers who need to diagnose complex streaming installations or compare service providers. electronics
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For short duration live events, Streaming Perspective offers a Live Event Service that measures streams with higher checking frequencies. desktop pc
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Keynote Streaming Perspective is the industry's most advanced service for measuring, managing and improving the performance and availability of streaming media, providing global coverage for measurements of streaming media delivery from nine U.S. and five international locations -- New York, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, Tokyo, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Frankfurt. Streaming Perspective allows companies who rely on high quality streams to meet internal and external goals and validate service level agreements between themselves and customers or vendors. think pad
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Streaming Perspective features the latest versions of QuickTime, RealPlayer and Windows Media Player and simplifies performance management by simulating the behavior of end-users in cities around the world. It is the official source of measurement behind the Microsoft Windows Media 9 Series Certification Program. data recovery
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Keynote measures relevant statistics about streaming performance for both on-demand and live events, from user log-on to the site through streaming download. These statistics include: connection success rate (CSR), average bit rate (ABR) and StreamQ, a proprietary metric which provides an accurate measurement of overall stream quality based on connect time, buffer time and rebuffer time. keyboard
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CSR indicates the percentage of checks where scanners were successfully able to play the stream. ABR and StreamQ are based only on checks that managed to connect -- failed checks are ignored for the purpose of calculating these quantities. desktop
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About Keynote refurbished laptops
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Founded in 1995, Keynote Systems (Nasdaq:KEYN), The Internet Performance Authority(R), is the worldwide leader in Web performance measurement and management services that improve the quality of e-business. Keynote's services enable corporate enterprises to monitor, benchmark, test, diagnose and optimize their e-business systems both inside and outside the firewall. Over 2,100 corporate IT departments and 19,000 individual subscribers rely on the company's easy-to-use and cost-effective services to increase revenues and reduce downtime costs, without requiring additional complex and costly software implementations. lap top
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Keynote is The Internet Performance Authority due to the company's global infrastructure of over 1,600 measurement computers in more than 50 cities worldwide that capture and store on a daily basis over 40 million Internet performance measurements, frequent media citations quoting Keynote's Web performance data and analysis and the company's growing range of market-leading Web performance indices for vertical markets (http://www.keynote.com/solutions/solutions_pi_index.html). memory
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Keynote Systems, Inc. is headquartered in San Mateo, California and can be reached at www.keynote.com or by phone in the U.S. at 650-403-2400. as400
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Keynote, The Internet Performance Authority, Perspective and StreamQ are registered trademarks of Keynote Systems, Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. hardware
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Contacts storage
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Della Lowe, 650-403-3323 printers
dlowe@keynote.com technology
Dan Berkowitz, 650-403-3305
dberkowitz@keynote.com