But when conveying video and data streams in urban locales, what matters most is little interference and cross talk.

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But it also uses other metrics, including total time spent, and last year began collecting data on video streams initiated by users at sites such as Google's YouTube, which it said provided a more accurate picture of the online video audience than unique visitors did.

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The U.S. Departments of Defense and Homeland Security have a great interest in being able to search for words across various streams of audio and video data.

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In effect, the client passes the very small amount of data from keypresses or console clicks to a data centre, and streams the video and audio resulting from those clicks back down the pipe to the screen.

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With advances in feature and pattern recognition and other forms of machine intelligence, these video streams will throw off a tremendous amount of structured data, the use of which we will have no knowledge of or control over.

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One major upgrade will be to the playback experience by offering not just higher-resolution streams, but various levels of video clarity based on device capabilities, screen size and data speeds.

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But video poses real challenges, as it consumes considerably more bandwidth than both voice and data, and video quality degrades substantially, often unacceptably, when network congestion interrupts or delays individual packets in traffic streams.

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