Want to see if your current streaming video offering is behind the times? Here are a few streaming video files from 25 media sites, like ABC, CBS, and ESPN. There are also 25 major corporate sites. I analyzed the files and divided them into three categories— conservative, mid-range and aggressive—by screen resolution.

As you can see, the days of 320x240 video at 300 kbps (kilobits per second) are long past. CNN streams most of their videos at 640x360 at 800 kbps, while prime time TV replays are often at 848x480 at 1.2 mbps (megabits per second). Apple streamed their largest iPad promotional video at 848x480 at a startling 2.7 mbps.

If you haven’t updated your streaming video configuration in a year or two (or three or four), you can deploy a larger resolution, higher quality stream that your viewers can stream and play in real time. As with living room television sets, bigger is almost always better when it comes to streaming video—otherwise, the networks wouldn’t have boosted the quality of their streaming video.

Like it or not, you’re subtly judged by the size and quality of your streaming video, not only vis-a-vis the ESPNs of the world, but particularly by comparison with your competition, and other videos your target viewers frequently play. If you’re still using that 320x240 at 300 kbps configuration, you’re almost certainly hurting the perception of your organization in the marketplace.

The next point related to a technology called adaptive streaming, which is offered by a variety of vendors, including Adobe (called Dynamic Streaming), Microsoft (called Smooth Streaming) and Apple for its iDevices (called HTTP Live Streaming). Briefly, adaptive streaming technologies encode your source video files into multiple versions at a variety of resolutions and data rates. Then, the technology distributes the optimal encoded file for your viewer’s connection speed and playback device, and continually monitors connection speed during the broadcast to ensure that video playback is sustained.

If streaming throughput drops during the transmission for some reason, a lower bitrate file is sent, sustaining the broadcast. If throughput later increases, a higher bitrate file will be sent. All this switching is totally transparent to the viewer, who may notice some differences in quality, but the stream will go on. As an example, Major League Baseball encodes their games into 11 different versions for their subscription video service, using multiple systems to adaptively stream to their computer-based and mobile customers.

If you’re casually serving a few video files on your site, adaptive streaming is definitely overkill. But if the quality of your streaming video is critical to your training, marketing or other activities, you should consider adaptive streaming, particularly if you’re starting to think about HD delivery, or distributing video to mobile phones.

In the June 2009 update to their Visual Networking Index Forecast and Methodology report for 2008-2013, Cisco reported that Internet video now accounted more than one-third of all consumer Internet traffic, and that video on demand traffic will grow at a 53 percent compound annual growth rate between 2008 and 2103. Cisco further predicted that mobile traffic will double every year through 2013, increasing by 66x between 2008 and 2013, and that over 60 percent of that mobile traffic will be video by 2013.

B2C companies need to be more aggressive with offering mobile video than B2B enterprises, since consumer news and entertainment are the videos most accessed by early adapters. For all organizations, however, if video is mission critical to your marketing, sales, communication or other enterprise pursuits, and you haven’t already started thinking about a mobile strategy, now is the time.

Jan Ozer has written more than 10 books related to the video world. He is an AVT Advisor and a frequent industry speaker.