InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
November 17, 1997
Netscape's Streaming Video Reversal
Vendor plans to add the technology for users of corporate intranets
Until recently, Netscape had downplayed streaming video as irrelevant to its enterprise customers. But company officials now say those customers are starting to evaluate intranet-based video for training, communications, and other applications.
Netscape rivals Lotus Development and Microsoft have already entered the streaming market. Lotus this month introduced StreamCam, which streams Lotus ScreenCam animation files over intranets. Many companies use nonstreaming ScreenCam files for training and had asked Lotus to add streaming capabilities, says Diane Riemer, group manager for ScreenCam. Last week, Microsoft released NetShow 2.1, an upgrade to its streaming media client-server package that adds a highly scalable vid
eo server useful in large organizations.
"There's a growing demand for video training solutions that involve streaming video," says Steve Pearson, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan in Mountain View, Calif. "For off-site training systems, it's a significant cost savings over flying people to one location."
Netscape will discontinue Media Server 1.0, a standalone product that streams only audio. Enterprise Server, due in the second quarter, will stream multimedia via HTTP-a standard for serving Web pages-and the Real Time Streaming Protocol, an emerging Internet standard. Enterprise Server will support IP Multicast, a protocol that saves bandwidth by allowing multiple clients to tap into one data stream.
To display the video on the client side, Netscape will offer a Java applet based on JavaSoft's Java Media Framework, a set of instructions for developing media clients in Java. Netscape still hasn't announced which streaming file formats or compression technologies its products will support.
etscape Communications will do an about-face on streaming video next year by adding streaming capabilities to its Enterprise Server and introducing a Java-based media player.
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