InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
| September 15, 1997 |
Full Stream Ahead
Streaming video moves to the intranet for more effective training, clearer communication, and more-responsive decision making
Among the pioneering users is Federal Express Corp., which is implementing a system that will stream a live status report on the express-delivery company's transportation system to 1,300 sites worldwide. 3Com Corp. this quarter will start using live video to brief salespeople. Johnson & Johnson Inc. plans to send TV commercials to executives for approval. In one of the largest deployments yet, Boeing Co. is delivering corporate and industry news to as many as 145,000 intranet users.
"I hear a lot of talk about how streaming video is all hype and vaporware," says Charlotte Miller, program manager for internal training at Boeing. "But I truly believe that this technology is a great way to change a culture."
In a business world where effective communication is critical, these early adopters see an advantage in streaming video. "Studies have shown that by using sight, sound, motion, and emotion, you increase retention and comprehension," says Trudy Wonder, empl
oyee communications manager at GE Information Services in Rockville, Md., which plans to pump video to more than 2,000 seats in 65 locations within a year.
So far, corporate adoption of the technology has been slow, though no figures are available. "A lot of companies are not sure how to use it," says Rob Enderle, an analyst at Giga Information Group in Santa Clara, Calif. "It's a solution looking for a problem."
Not even intranet champion Marc Andreessen, executive VP of products at Netscape Communications, is gung ho about streaming video. The technology, he says, "has been relegated to corporate training, where any technology that doesn't really have a use" is sent.
Netscape's archrival sees things differently. Microsoft in recent months acquired one streaming video vendor, VXtreme Inc. in Palo Alto, Calif., and bought a 10% stake in another, Progressive Networks Inc. in Seattle. Last week, Microsoft and other vendors unveiled a new version of the Advanced Streaming Format, which defines how to
contain multiple media types, including video, audio, and text, in a single streaming file. ASF could be used in place of the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 formats long used in CD-ROMs (see story, below). Microsoft says it will submit the ASF specification to an international standards body, but it has not decided which one-nor has it set a date for submission.
Microsoft's Impact
Other maturing standards spurring adoption of streaming video are IP Multicast and the Real Time Streaming Protocol. IP Multicast conserves bandwidth by letting a number of users tap into one data stream. RTSP dictates ho
w a client tells a server to start, stop, and regulate a stream. It's expected to be ratified by the Internet Engineering Task Force in November.
IP Multicast, for example, is used by Precept Software Inc.'s IP/TV software, which Federal Express is evaluating for the company's transportation status update. Called FXTV, the report is now broadcast via FedEx's VSAT analog satellite network to TV sets, where employees congregate to watch. But soon they will view it at their desktops via the intranet-live or on a continuous playback all day.
"Being a global company in 211 countries, it's critical that we're able to communicate to our sites the status of how the transportation system is operating," says Keith McGarr, managing director of Internet engineering at FedEx.
3Com will begin using live video this quarter to brief its sales force on new products. The goal is to get those products to the marketplace faster. The Santa Clara, Calif., networking products company already uses WebForce MediaBase from
Silicon Graphics Inc. to deliver stored video on demand to 5,000 sales and marketing employees worldwide. But letting them view at their own pace can keep them from visiting customers as quickly as management would like, says Michael Greene, a multimedia developer at 3Com's carrier systems unit in Skokie, Ill. "The quicker we can train our employees to go out and sell, the better," he adds.
At Boeing, the corporate intranet delivers seven "channels" of training and news. One channel features managers from Boeing divisions around the world presenting their best manufacturing practices-in
formation that would not be shared otherwise, says Fred Kelley, a senior manager of communication and technology. The aerospace company eventually hopes to deliver live video of executive addresses and meetings with customers. "When you're talking about people-to-people communication," Kelley says, "video is how we can exchange the most information in the shortest period of time."
Johnson & Johnson is testing the StarWorks streaming video server from StarLight Networks Inc. so that as many as 60 executives worldwide can view TV commercials the health-care products company plans to air. Currently, the executives get them on videotape in a process that takes up to two months. The company hopes its intranet application will cut that time to two weeks or less. "It gives us the capability to respond quicker to false advertisements or flame ads" by competitors, says Jim Walsh, director of customer communications technologies at Johnson & Johnson.
Speed Counts
Other companies use lower-performance systems that stream at 28.8 Kbps or less. Boeing, for example, uses Progressive's RealVideo product, which is widely used on public Web sites.
Some vendors have developed all-in-one packages. For example, Silicon Graphics and Starlight Networks have integrated Progressive's low-end software into their high-end products so they can stream at rates ranging from below 28.8 Kbps up to 8 Mbps. That means companies can maintain networks with varying bandwidth.
As streaming video moves from being a futuristic technology to
a mainstream one, vendors are developing innovative offshoots. For example, Digital Renaissance and Ephyx Technologies Ltd.produce "hypervideo" development environments for linking video to other media.
Visa International in Foster City, Calif., is evaluating Ephyx's V-Active as a way to bolster commerce applications that use the Secure Electronic Transaction protocol for secure online purchasing. V-Active uses object tracking to hyperlink objects in a video image to other objects, such as Web pages or text drawn from a database and overlaid on the video image.
"You could click on something you see as you're wandering down an aisle of video images, and more information pops up," says Visa VP Paul Guthrie. "If you like the capabilities, then you utilize the SET protocol to complete the purchase."
Such interactive video applications will drive further adoption of streaming video, says Giga analyst Greg Tapper. Hypervideo could enable a whole new class of applications. "Hypervideo is to video what hypertext is to text," Tapper says. "It's going to be the keystone to video."
-With additional reporting by
Clinton Wilder
and
G
regory Dalton
See related story "
The Best File Format
"
|
treaming video technology, until now relegated to the gee-whiz realm of niche applications and mass-media Web sites, is making its move intomainstream business. The technology is already used to deliver market-sensitive news to stock traders and to train employees in many industries. Now, it's being implemented or tested on a number of intranets to help companies improve communications, as well as speed decision making and time to market. The market got a big boost last week when 40 vendors led by Microsoft pledged s
upport for a standard video file format.
3Com's live sessions will be beamed via satellite to remote sites. From there, the LiveSystem encoder from Optivision Inc. will convert the digital signals into MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 files, which WebForce MediaBase will stream over each LAN.
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