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To-do list for Streaming media:  ·  history ·  watch ·  refresh · Updated 2019-04-25 Here are some tasks awaiting attention: Cleanup : Turn Protocol issues bullet points into paragraphs. Thin bandwidth calculations. Copyedit : Stitch short paragraphs into longer ones Update : Describe the environmental impacts of video streaming Wikify : Add links to codecs and protocols. Move many See also links into text. Clarify difference between live and on-demand streaming

The contents of the First Live Streaming U.S. Internet Concert page were merged into Streaming media on April 22, 2012. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected page, please see its history; for the discussion at that location, see its talk page.

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 12 January 2022 and 22 April 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Lyra.taylor ( article contribs).

There are clearly a number of strange errors here but the most egregious is surely the following section: "This competition was increased during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic as more people stayed home and watched TV. "The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a seismic shift in the film & TV industry in terms of how films are made, distributed and screened. Many industries have been hit by the economic affect of the pandemic" (Totaro Donato)."

This is followed by a citation from 1991, so unless there was an oracle publishing journal articles over thirty years ago, it's impossible for this quote to come from the text in question. There's also no context for who Totaro Donato is and 'economic affect' is virtually a non-sequitur. 2A02:8084:4F60:5600:1F0:C9F0:809D:8E18 ( talk) 12:33, 31 May 2023 (UTC) reply

NotPeterParker and I are involved in an edit war over their revisions. I'm having trouble connecting the edit comments to the changes. Perhaps I'm reading the diffs wrong; It's happened before. These are my objections.

1. The online or offline qualifier is unnecessary in the first sentence of the lead and is WP:JARGONY
2. The added Media player link is to a WP:DISAMBIG page. Such links are generally discouraged.
3. Introduction of client is WP:JARGON and is not necessarily correct or clear. Media is typically streamed from a server to a client media player.

~ Kvng ( talk) 22:38, 21 September 2023 (UTC) reply

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAYF-m1z7o4 . Xerox Parc, later went on to use my video streaming code for it's NV video conference. John.sokol ( talk) 22:49, 5 October 2023 (UTC) reply

Working on adding info, but not sure if relevant.

MySpace and Facebook

On the internet, one of the first disrupters to the music scene was MySpace, a social networking website launched in 2003 where people started sharing their indie music with others online. It offered an alternative to mainstream pop piracy without directly contributing to it. Facebook came out the next year and competed with MySpace. PuppyMonkey ( talk) 07:03, 18 October 2023 (UTC) reply

According to CNBC and other news outlets, lots of consumers are canceling their subscriptions due to price hikes. GuyUser81 ( talk) 22:08, 20 January 2024 (UTC) reply

@ SnowyCinema has added another/different video to the article. Here's my response to the request in the edit summary for an explanation in favor of removal. Better to discuss here than go back and forth in edit summaries - plus, we need consensus, not warring. To explain/expand the context:

• December 17, 2014, @ Paulschou adds a video with the caption "A still from a Live stream of a fish tank, Schou FishCam", with no edit summary. This appears to be the first inclusion of a video as an 'example', going all the way back to 2001.
• March 9, 2021, @ CoolingGibbon replaces the goldfish with a video of the Crab Nebula, with the caption "A streaming video about the Crab Nebula created by NASA", with no edit summary.
• December 14, 2023, @ Belbury replaces the Crab Nebula with "The Three Musketeers", with the caption "When a user of the Wikipedia website clicks on a video, such as this full-length 118-minute copy of the 1921 film The Three Musketeers, the video starts streaming instantly while rest of the film begins to be downloaded in the background. If the connection is lost, the video will only play as far as it had downloaded". The edit summary for that was "explain what the example video is trying to do (and swap it for a much longer one to make it clear that a two hour video isn't instantly downloaded".
• December 29, 2023, @ SuperFeral replaces The Three Musketeers with "The Birth of a Nation", changing a portion of the caption to "As a public-domain film, it is available on a wide range of streaming services, and on websites such as YouTube." (etc), with an edit summary of "I've put The Birth of a Nation to show a further example of streaming media".
• January 1, 2024, SnowyCinema replaces The Birth of a Nation with "Safety Last!", with its previous caption, with an edit summary of "Let's not include the racist movie. Putting in a better sample film".
• January 6, 2024, SuperFeral replaces Safety Last! with "The Jazz Singer", modifying the caption with "The Jazz Singer (1927), considered to be a turning point for the advent of sound films, found in most streaming services. It has entered public domain in January 1st, 2023, due to it being published before January 1st, 1928, in the United States.", with an edit summary of "I've put The Jazz Singer to show a sound film example, as sound films are found in most streaming services".
• January 6, 2024, (a few minutes later), SuperFeral restores Safety Last!, with an edit summary of "I've put Safety Last! again because The Jazz Singer has some objectionable racist blackface stuff. Better to wait a non-racist talkie to enter public domain".
• January 6, 2024, (a few hours later), I remove the video, with an edit summary of "Removing the film entirely. The example is unnecessary, as playing it doesn't in any way _explain_ how streaming works. The article exists to explain it. We don't need a battleground on the content".
• January 23, 2024, SnowyCinema adds "Steamboat Willie (1928)", using the same caption, with an edit summary of "I disagree with the removal of this. "... it starts streaming instantly while the rest of the film begins to be downloaded in the background. If the connection is lost, the video will only play as far as it had downloaded." is a clear and simple explanation of how streaming works, and this works well as a sandbox for users to demonstrate this functionality. Tell me how it's not. There doesn't need to be a battleground, but not wanting obvious racism at the forefront of "streaming" is reasonable."

So, with that history of the edits, I'll respond to SnowyCinema. The video itself does not demonstrate how streaming media works. It is simply a streaming video. It doesn't demonstrate how it begins streaming instantly while the rest of the film begins to "download" in the background - "download" is incorrect nomenclature (also used by previous editors), as described in the second paragraph of the article; there are many forms of media streaming that do not buffer in the background, some just stop (see Zoom Video Communications or many livestreams), others have small buffers that last a few seconds, while services such as Netflix have much larger buffers that can last minutes; it doesn't demonstrate what happens if the connection is lost - unless the reader turns off their internet connection themselves. It is again, merely a video, of which literally billions like it exist. The caption largely duplicates - imperfectly - the information in the second paragraph, which is redundant and unnecessary.

By picking a specific film as the 'example', it opens up exactly what's been happening. As far as 'not wanting obvious racism at the forefront', that's irrelevant. Both films (Birth of a Nation and The Jazz Singer) are deemed to be "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and are preserved by the US Library of Congress. As are Safety Last! and Steamboat Willie. That's a high bar for inclusion - so far, only 875 films have been preserved thus, out of hundreds of thousands to millions that have been made ("films" in the formal, artistic sense). The link to the film doesn't promote racism, it's a link a historically significant film. But as I said, none of that is relevant, because neither the swimming goldfish, the Crab Nebula, The Three Musketeers, The Birth of a Nation, Safety Last!, The Jazz Singer, nor Steamboat Willie demonstrate how streaming works. Whenever an article offers an opportunity for editors to select what X they think is important/neat/a favorite/whatever - out of innumerable available X - this sort of devolution of edits becomes possible. See the article history for Cat if you don't believe me.

There are also no "examples" of streaming audio, closed captioning, ticker tape, or real-time text, all of which are also considered streaming media.

I would support inclusion of a video that actually gives examples of how streaming media works. That would probably be technical details with snippets showing things such as the video 'glitching' due to interruptions of the stream. But I think that's unnecessary; the article exists to describe what streaming media is.

Yes, I can sure type a lot of words. I blame strong coffee. Please consider these arguments, and I hope we can come to a consensus - preferably one that eliminates an 'example' video, unless it actually demonstrates what it claims to demonstrate. :) cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 21:21, 23 January 2024 (UTC) reply

@ Anastrophe: I first want to say that you've been mistaken that I ever reverted the inclusion of The Jazz Singer, which might explain why you perceived this as a "battleground". But, from your chronology it does look like this has been somewhat of a battleground after all, but my role in the "battle" is much more limited than you might think. :) (I did fix that in your comment, hopefully you don't mind.)

I don't know that I can comment too much on the technical details of streaming technology, since I admit that's a little over my head (though it shouldn't be because I need to be working with it in my own coding life). But I was under the impression that the way streaming was described in the caption was correct, since that's always how it's been simplified to me.

But, I'm gonna focus specifically on the film history element, since that's my own niche. As a proactive member on Wikisource's WikiProject Film, I transcribed the entire film The Birth of a Nation from start to finish (meaning I had to watch it slowly, and analyze every bit of it with a great amount of care), and even its "sequel" Intolerance, and a few other Griffith films, as well as Jolson's part-talkie The Jazz Singer and Jolson's sort of "follow-up" movie The Singing Fool (not included in this discussion), and even the more family-friendly Safety Last! and Steamboat Willie, so I feel like I should have some room to talk about how much racism appears in all of the films being discussed.

The film The Birth of a Nation, the worst of them all, is a very explicit portrayal of white supremacist ideology. The film for its first hour and a half may look mostly innocent, but that's just because you'd be watching the Civil War half of it. Go to the next half, and it's just filled with explicit portrayals of the Lost Cause myth, treating black people sort of like the amoral "ghouls" from the later horror film Night of the Living Dead. Basically, what I took out of the film's primary argument (at least as far as its more well-known "Reconstruction" half goes) is that if you give the ever so evil black people an inch, they take a mile. If you give them freedom, they take power. And, according to the film, the "reasonable and intelligent Whites" were absolutely crushed by Black society during that era. The film therefore encourages the lynching of black people, seeing this as an act of goodwill to alleviate what the film sees as the threat that white people face from a desegregated society. I really don't know how you could get much closer to explicitly racist than just including a 4chan meme on a Wikipedia article.

No matter how you wanna interpret the film, even if you wanna disagree with some details of my interpretation (it has been a little while since I've seen it, and I admit not wanting to watch a 3 hour racist propaganda film again which should be reasonable), I'm sure that all of us can agree that the film's message was fervently white supremacist. I distinctly remember, about 10 years ago or so, having read a news article or blog post of some sort (I can never find it anymore) trying to exonerate D. W. Griffith from claims of him being racist, by claiming Griffith was just "in it for the controversy and following the money," so I understand some good-faith cinephiles with a soft spot for Griffith may exist even today. But to them I'd respond, that his film Intolerance, a direct response to the NAACP and other critics of the film's racism, his close relationship to his father who fought in the Confederacy, the very exhaustive extent to which he worked on innovating the film (he didn't just make any movie, he made perhaps the most widely watched film in America for many decades, and also it's way longer than a silent film needed to be especially in 1915), and a 1930 sound interview used as a prelude to a newer release of The Birth, are all evidence of his continued belief in the Lost Cause ideology, and the fact that he never apologized for his views and in fact fully believed what he was portraying in The Birth throughout all of his life as far as the evidence available to me suggests.

The devil's in the details. Given that I'm sure we can all agree that the film is basically the poster child of anti-black racism in America, I don't think any notion of "who preserved the film" should matter in that discussion. I do respect the National Film Registry, don't get me wrong, and I was surprised at the very low number of films they actually restored—but they're not the only restorationists who provide us films for our Wikimedia Commons, and the National Film Registry is a modern organization that was completely unknown to the actual film industry of the early 20th century, making it irrelevant to discussions about the film's content.

The fact remains that the film's sensitive content is inappropriate for an article that is completely unrelated to that sensitive topic. I have no issue including The Birth of a Nation on articles about that specific film, about D. W. Griffith, the Klan, or white supremacism in America, because that's relevant to the topic and useful to the article. But to be including it willy nilly on random articles that have nothing to do with the rather touchy subjects that the film embarrasses the West with, is a bit much. It'd be sort of like including a porn film like Debbie Does Dallas, or a "real gore" video of people actually dying, at the forefront of the Streaming media article.

I never claimed that the inclusion of The Birth of a Nation or any other film video in the article is a "promotion of racism", and I never accused anyone of being racist, but it easily makes it out as if we do. And as someone actually passionate for these silent films, and as someone who wants people to actually appreciate the medium (which I believe today's world currently doesn't), I am very much concerned with which films people are randomly presented in articles.

You might be surprised to know that I (personally) don't have too much of an issue with The Jazz Singer or The Singing Fool: despite the fact that the films do contain blackface, I actually like the movies quite a lot and have seen them multiple times. ( A Plantation Act though...well, that's another story...) I think Jolson was very much not a racist guy (and that might be controversial on my own part to believe, but I'm not gonna get into it here). He was certainly not a guy who hated black people like Griffith was, and the Klan (~The Birth) would've certainly targeted Jewish Lithuanian immigrants like Jolson as well. Anyway, the relationship with Jolson's first feature films and race is a complicated one. Though blackface does appear, it only appears rather briefly at the end of both movies, and despite popular belief, the focus of the movies' plots themselves are not on blackface acting or minstrel shows. In fact, race is barely even mentioned in both films. However, the contemporary promotion of the films focused extensively on the blackface parts, because Jolson happened to be known for his blackface acts even at the time of the films' releases. For The Jazz Singer being included in an article like this, I don't really care if it's included or not that much...but I'd lean towards not including it, because anyone who knows the name of the film, or reads even a little bit about it, will discover that its ties to blackface are well-known in film history. (I think this is unfortunate, because I wanna reiterate did really love the movie—in fact it's one of my personal favorites—and I believe if Jolson just didn't wear any blackface 1. the plot would remain largely the same and 2. his legacy wouldn't be nearly as divisive today.) My dividing point is: what's the point of the movie? With The Birth, the point is "grunt! black people dangerous, less than white people, they take over society if not slave!" And with The Jazz Singer, the film is a complex and intelligent narrative about tradition in the Jewish community and its interplay with "Broadway" society, so the film's overall message has nothing to do with black people at all, much less black racism.

I thought Safety Last! and especially Steamboat Willie were much better representatives for an article like this. For one, Steamboat Willie is widely known as a family-friendly short sound cartoon, without much emphasis in modern discourse being on even its more problematic or disputable elements (like the portrayal of animal abuse that I see some people casually noting). Safety Last! is less well-known than Willie, but has very few problematic elements and is quite family-friendly, so I'd put it at a close second with Willie for inclusion.

If we're going to have a video, let's just use Steamboat Willie. It's great because it's popularly known, it's a well-made movie, it's fairly short making the video easier to use in the browser, it has sound (unlike most of the rest of the candidates) giving it a technical edge, and it's not problematic in terms of politics or explicit content.

My overall argument is, let's keep the random classic film videos family-friendly, and especially clean of overt racism, unless they need to not be for some reason. If the video isn't relevant to streaming capabilities, okay I guess. I thought it was a nice way to experiment with streaming, but I'm no expert on that technology so you can fight with pitchforks on that separately if you want.

So I would strongly disagree that the inclusion of racist content is "irrelevant". No matter how much Wikipedia and its sisters want to remain a neutral project, which I fully understand, the true fact of the matter is that these things do have real-world consequences—ranging from people gaining a distaste or misunderstanding of film history, to actually creating more racists and extremists (which in the end causes more unfortunate deaths due to people's extremism), to giving Wikipedia as a project a bad image, or its editors, or to silent film enthusiasts... Or just an unexpected bit of disturbing reminder of these hurtful views and racist imagery. For those who might doubt that people today would believe in the messages of The Birth, I should note that the Ku Klux Klan very much still exists today and has influence, and I have word that they still use this very 1915 film for promotion and recruitment (at least as of the mid-1970s which is relatively pretty modern)... Not all movies are created equal, and not all messages are equally valid. We have a choice on what movies we can include, and it's better to be a bit indecisive than to go with the poster child of racism without any debate "just because it's well-known".

In any case, regardless of if you end up disagreeing with my points, I do very much appreciate the very long-form response you gave here. I often feel like my response lengths are too much, and I find it annoying when people half-ass their wiki posts on the contrary. I expected the worst from a discussion on Wikipedia (I don't much like this community), thinking that all I'd get was some "see WP:THISPOLICY and WP:THATGUIDELINE" laziness. So, thanks for an interesting and thought-provoking discussion. You have my sincerest gratitude and respect for that. Regards, SnowyCinema ( talk) 07:36, 24 January 2024 (UTC) reply

Thanks for your reply, Snowy (hope the short form is okay). Also thanks for fixing the error, it was a chore bringing all that together, and I knew no matter how many times I reviewed it, I'd screw something up. ta-da!

As for the discussion of racism, I think my comments may have been ambiguous and thus misconstrued. I'm not saying that racism itself is irrelevant. For the purposes of an "example" of streaming media, it's the content that is irrelevant (as is my opinion of that content - personally, I'm against the trend of the "disappearing" of anything that's racist - it erases history, which dooms us to repeat it - and again, irrelevant to this matter). I wasn't arguing in favor of, or even against The Birth of a Nation or The Jazz singer; my overriding argument is against any arbitrarily chosen film as an 'example'. Since none of the films actually describe streaming media, or provide mockups of what the various defects and glitches are that can occur, to me it's the equivalent of putting a pretty picture of a pretty flower from one's pretty garden into the article on Biology. It is pretty, but it doesn't inform the actual subject matter. Personally, if I thought a film was necessary in the article, I'd choose Wild Strawberries. Or maybe The Thin Red Line. Then again, maybe 8½, or The Matrix. I could base it on films I worked on, such as Bram Stoker's Dracula or Terminator 2, or even Wild at Heart. Or perhaps a Netflix series I enjoyed, say, Altered Carbon or Maniac. I know that most/all of these are still under copyright and couldn't be used, I'm just trying to show that it's an editor's personal preference that ultimately drives such as choice for inclusion, since there's no overriding restraint or limitation.

Any film included here is included arbitrarily, within the confines of copyright of course. When that sort of opportunity arises, it's quite common for it to become either contentious or merely annoying, having editor after editor substituting random preferred choices in the article, only to be overridden by someone else's random preferred choice, ad infinitum.

Thus, why I argue against inclusion of any film at all, since none of the examples so far actually describes what streaming media is or how it works. Interestingly, this is one of the rare "conflicts" (I use the term in its weakest meaning) that - so far as I can tell - no wikilawyering is even possible, since I'm pretty sure there is no formal policy or guideline one way or the other on this particular matter - though I'd bet someone could find one if they tried hard enough! I have no interest in that angle; wikilawyering is a soul-destroying endeavor. I'm just pleading the case for not having a film (or anything else) included in the article, for the reasons I've articulated.

With that, it's time for some sleep for me, so not a peep will derive from me again for quite some hours... cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 08:31, 24 January 2024 (UTC) reply

@ Anastrophe: Well, after giving this a bit of thought, I've removed the film, returning the article to its "default" state. It's not a hill I'd personally die on, just to include a film at all here, but I do feel strongly about my points around a film focusing on a racist message not being included at the top of an article as general as this, and I'd feel similarly about a pornographic film or a "real gore" film, or the like, as well. Even a more controversial "progressive" film (such as an episode of the military recruitment series The Calling), I'd feel similarly about not including here because of the politically-charged bickering it would cause.

We can all have our personal preferences about which movie should be included based on quality of the film, and I do have a great appreciation for a lot of different films as well as you do. So there doesn't need to be a set-in-stone boundary about "this movie and only this movie!" But, we should probably just draw the line on the very controversial (and especially irrelevant to the topic) ones, since again they reflect badly for reasons already stated. In other words, I am in full support of using public-domain videos all over our articles—please, give these old movies the modern legacy they deserve, since that appreciation is lacking most everywhere else—but my view is a lot more cautious with the most controversial films of that era.

And I absolutely agree that we shouldn't want to "erase" film history, and that's why I think it's not just acceptable, but expected, that a video of The Birth be included in a plethora of articles about racism, the people involved with that film, and hell, even a section of a general film history article about film advancements that The Birth achieved. I mean keep in mind, too, that the transcription I completed on Wikisource was something I did despite the fact that I knew it might reflect poorly on me later, because I care about the film history being known and accessible despite its grosser elements. But, I still maintain that on the top of a general article like this, with a focus on just streaming and that's it, that it's inappropriate.

And, maybe this speaks more to the irrelevance of these silent films at all towards the general topic of streaming media, since obviously they had no such technology at the time. Lol

Well, that ends my diatribe. As far as the utility of using a video to demonstrate streaming capability (at all), I have less strong arguments, so I'll leave that to the rest of you. Sleep well! SnowyCinema ( talk) 09:05, 24 January 2024 (UTC) reply

All well said, and well agreed. cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 18:36, 24 January 2024 (UTC) reply

I think there's some utility to the online reader in giving them a simple streaming video to play around with, right there in the lead, so that they have the option to experiment with how streaming works without leaving the page - they can test what happens if they skip ahead, disable their internet connection, double back, etc.

For that reason I think it does have to be a full-length movie. A short like Steamboat Willie or the 3-minute NASA video may plausibly be downloaded in its entirety in a few seconds on a fast connection, leaving the reader to take our word for it that their browser was streaming it. Belbury ( talk) 08:35, 24 January 2024 (UTC) reply

@ Belbury: There are a lot of part-talkies and silents with synchronized sound that came into the PD in recent years. My recommendation would be a film like Lights of New York (1928, full talkie), Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927, synchronized sound), 7th Heaven (1927, synchronized sound). For some more modern examples, The Little Princess (1939), Night of the Living Dead (1968), and The Vampire Bat (1933) are either good-quality or well-known. All of these should be fairly uncontroversial as well, with the exception of (maybe you could conservatively argue) NotLD, but eh. SnowyCinema ( talk) 09:28, 24 January 2024 (UTC) reply

You make a good point above that silent films are anachronistic for an article about internet streaming. There are longer NASA videos on Commons; a quick search turns up the 2h39m File:NASAs Boeing OFT-2 Deorbit Burn and Landing.webm, which would have been livestreamed at the time and may be more appropriate here. That one might introduce some unnecessary confusion between streaming and livestreaming, but there will be other neutral, modern documentaries on Commons. Belbury ( talk) 09:42, 24 January 2024 (UTC) reply

I think the utility of such an addition is minimal. In order to read wikipedia, one has to have a phone, a tablet, a laptop, a PC. If one has such a device, while not a certainty, it's a pretty extraordinary likelihood that they have had opportunity to consume streaming media, on YouTube, TikTok, Hulu, Amazon Video, etc., and have experienced the various defects that can occur while consuming same, well before reaching this article.

Again, Wikipedia is here to describe the topic, not necessarily provide synthetic demonstrations. The lede of this article does an excellent job of concisely describing streaming media and the challenges found in delivery. cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 18:52, 24 January 2024 (UTC) reply

I find the discussion of “which important-old-film to include?” rather distracting. I believe there should be an example, but that example should not distract from the medium of streamed film. Including anyone’s favorite example of a feature film will only distract the reader from the subject at hand.

The best footage to include IMO would be a clip of Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, though I’m not sure including even a small clip of that film on this page would be fair use. Alternatively, and probably the simplest example, would be some clip from a free (appropriately CC licensed) stream, as was added in 2014. Unfortunately that image is only a still, but provides an example of the medium itself, rather than just a rebroadcast of old films in this new medium. Of course this isn’t as much of a problem for those who just want to illustrate the page, rather than give an example of a stream in actuality.

(For the record, I see no need to include an inherently racist film, like Birth of a Nation, but I don’t believe other less politically-correct films should be similarly discounted.) —  HTGS ( talk) 21:08, 25 January 2024 (UTC) reply

How does Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees demonstrate how streaming media works, or for that matter the stream of the fishcam? Just playing a video doesn't describe or explain what is taking place. The article describes and explains it. cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 01:10, 26 January 2024 (UTC) reply

An image of an apple at Apple doesn’t demonstrate how an apple works either. For that matter, an image of an Apple iPhone doesn’t demonstrate how an iPhone works either. Illustration gives the reader context, and adds, at the very least, visual interest.

In saying that, if you want to produce a video that helps the reader understand the technology better, then I strongly support that. —  HTGS ( talk) 20:48, 28 January 2024 (UTC) reply

Your examples are non-sequitur, as they don't (at least as of a cursory review of the respective articles) have captions that go beyond what they illustrate. If an editor added a video of a person biting into an apple at Apple and accompanied it with a caption stating "To eat an apple, you take a bite, masticate, then swallow, after which the acid in your stomach breaks the apple down into small pieces called chyme, which then passes through the pyloric sphincter where it's bathed in bile (etc etc etc)" they'd probably get some serious pushback. The caption, in and of itself, would be true enough, but it's not what the video would be illustrating. It's unlikely anyone would accept a caption much beyond "A person taking a bite of an apple".

The caption that accompanied the random videos here stated "When clicking on the video, it starts streaming instantly while the rest of the film begins to be downloaded in the background. If the connection is lost, the video will only play as far as it had downloaded" goes beyond what the embedded video is able to demonstrate - even setting aside the incorrect nomenclature used. Everything after "When clicking on the video, it starts to stream instantly" describes things not demonstrated by clicking on the video - and describes them grossly inaccurately.

As an aside, it was just plain bad presentation to have a caption that used incorrect terminology immediately adjacent to the portion of the lede where correct terminology describes what transpires. cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 22:59, 28 January 2024 (UTC) reply

Ohhh, sorry, I thought you were opposed to having a video at all. Yeah, I’m all for refining the caption, that’s fine with me. I just also think we could pick better examples. —  HTGS ( talk) 23:17, 28 January 2024 (UTC) reply

I am generally opposed to a video on the rationale I previously expressed, but that said, I'm okay with Steamboat Willie as long as the caption is accurate - and as long as we do not see a continuation of the random changes of the video based upon editor preference. cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 23:26, 28 January 2024 (UTC) reply

Well we certainly can’t just put a moratorium on changes to page content just because the changes are annoying—especially when the content selected is chosen merely for the fact that it is delivered by stream. But that’s part of the reason I would prefer a relevant video, one that is notable for being streamed, not just a random movie in the public domain. But if we are just going to use a public domain film, Steamboat Willie is a fine choice by me. —  HTGS ( talk) 04:21, 29 January 2024 (UTC) reply

UTC)

If we would ever have a video, I would prefer either a CC-licensed YouTube video or Night of the Living Dead; the former is far more modern, and the latter is a feature film, a common element of streaming services. FreedomWarWiki ( talk) 18:09, 5 February 2024 (UTC) reply

Just as I predicted, precisely. Where user preference is the only deciding value besides the technical requirements, this is going to keep happening. cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 20:02, 5 February 2024 (UTC) reply