by max van kleek
Streaming Media has come a long ways over the last five years.
Improvements in compression algorithms (CODECS), higher
connection speeds, broadband, and more powerful processors has lent
a steady increase in the audio and video fidelity of streaming media.
Instead of just audio, we now have everything from video and mixed
media streams, to immersive VR environments. Instead of a
postage-stamp-sized choppy video, we now have "near-poor-VCR"
quality
that might reasonably be blown up to a size of half of our high
resolution computer displays. These improvements have opened up the
possibilities of using streaming media as a means of "netcasting"
a wide array of new Net content: short independent films, music videos,
movie trailers, and net music radio stations.
Windowsmedia.com, one popular directory for streaming media, features
streaming music, movie trailers, music videos, tv show previews, fashion
show clips and video game previews. Like competing RealNetwork's own
RealGuide (http://www.realguide.com/), Windowsmedia.com limits itself
to content encoded by the product of its parent company, which, in
the
case of Windowsmedia is Microsoft's Windows Media CODEC. These
biases to one particular streaming technology over others prevents
either streaming media guide from being an encompassing guide for
all
streaming material on the Net.
Microsoft joined the streaming media bandwagon later than all of
its
competitors, when it released a version of the Windows Media Player
outfitted with streaming codecs in late 1998. Since then, it has
exploded, and Microsoft claims that WindowsMedia.com reached the status
of "most popular multimedia guide on the Web" in June 2000,
even though
the website itself was introduced streaming media as late as August
1999. Meanwhile, RealNetworks claims its products are the still the
"most popular streaming technology on the Net, with 85% market
share".
Both companies have used aggressive tactics to try to shut each other
out; Real bundled their player with versions of Netscape Communicator
while Microsoft bundled the souped-up media player with all of their
recent operating systems, and with all releases of Internet Explorer.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5 featured a new "Radio Toolbar"
which
made the WindowsMedia.com site as accessible as a button on the
browser's toolbar. Further, Microsoft released Macintosh versions
of
their Media Player, but adoption has been relatively slow, due to
its
being outshadowed by Apple Computer's flagship Quicktime streaming
technology.
Yet, if today's streaming media technologies are to be driving the
technological media convergence, one can can easily surmise that there
is still a long way to go. Neither the current Internet infrastructure
or any of the CODECs are robust enough to support every person watching
TV-quality media streams instead of television. In fact, a public
beta-test of a new version of Microsoft's video CODEC claims to support
"near VHS-quality" video, which requires a monster 550-750kbps
sustained throughput to the streaming server, which is hard consistently
even with today's broadband. Sadly, even the "near-VCR quality"
is
still quite an exaggeration, for even mediocre VCRs don't exhibit
the
annoying compression fragments and jerky motion that even the highest
bitrates exhibit.
But by the enormous amount of streaming content delivered through
WindowsMedia.com, as evidenced by the constantly changing features
that
are showcased on the site's main page, it leads one to reason that
it is
starting to reach a large audience. With the progress that we have
been
seeing with respect to Internet connectivity and streaming technologies,
we can only be sure that streaming media will be reaching even larger
audiences over the next couple years.