August 14, 2000

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Streaming Media: Online Training, Cost-Cutting, And More

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More on streaming media:

AT&T Puts Weight Behind Streaming Media (7/17/00) TechWeb AT&T Launches Streaming Video Plan (7/11/00) InternetWeek Measuring Streaming Media (6/19/00)

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Even though business-to-consumer is where much of the activity is centered, businesses are increasingly using the Internet as a broadcast medium. "Global corporations are looking to get to market quickly and speed becomes important," says Sanjay Srivastava, VP of enterprise services for Akamai Technologies Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., which is building a dedicated network that bypasses other networks' pipelines on the Net, just for streaming media. "The whole streaming media world is focused around one-to-many, as opposed to many-to-many interaction."

Enterprises are using streaming media for internal and external communications, although most of it is found on internal company networks for communication and training purposes. External uses include broadcasting information to investors, customers, and potential customers. "Companies are discovering that for computer-based training and internal communication, digital media has the potential for dramatic cost reductions and efficiencies," says Kevin Unangst, group product manager of the Digital Media division at Microsoft. In a survey of its customers, Microsoft found that 46% of business and consumer customers use streaming media.

Companies can train their internal sales forces on a product and then use that video to sell to customers as well. "If we're going to have an E-world and close partnerships, you want to share as much information as possible," says Sadaranganey. "The key to supply-chain management is information sharing, and this is a powerful way to share information."

Distance learning is another popular use for streaming media, and its purpose is actually quite similar to that of entertainment outlets such as HOB.com: It lets people get what they want from a distance. In this case, it's an education. The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore has established a distance education division for public health workers to get master's degrees, and for the past year it has offered classes online.

"Our mission has been to try and provide public health workers around the world the opportunity to get continuing education from the world's No. 1-ranked school of public health, in a way that's flexible for them without having them be away from their families and jobs," says Brian Klaas, senior systems designer with Johns Hopkins.

Johns Hopkins has begun an Internet-based program, using material designed specifically for students watching on the Internet. While the video instruction isn't live, it's made available at set times for students to watch at their convenience, since many of them are outside of the United States and in different time zones. So far, Johns Hopkins has 280 students for the program and plans to double that in the next year. The program is considered a success.

"We've done a number of studies internally that say the education is equivalent to the quality they would get in the classroom," Klaas says. "The feedback we get from student evaluations is similar across-the-board from what they feel they've learned, whether they're in Baltimore or learning online, which tells us they're learning at the same rate."

For a media company like CNN, which offers video and audio news clips on its Web site, streaming media also has an internal use. CNN created a central database for its different news services so people can look for video clips of recent news. "Before, people would have to find a tape on a shelf or track down who had it," says Kevin Ivey, VP of research and development at CNN in Atlanta. "Then they'd have to find the material, take it to an edit room and view it, shuttling through the tape. All of this cut into their time."

The new media-management system lets CNN capture raw video footage and save low-resolution copies that all four CNN news outlets can access from an Informix Software Inc. database. From there, the outlets can locate the video reels and any production, such as voice-overs, so if a voice-over has been done for CNN Headline News, the CNN International bureau knows about the work and can use it.

The video is streamed internally via the company's intranet using Kasenna Inc.'s MediaBase, which is also used to stream video to CNN.com visitors. The content-management software was developed with Informix as a custom project, but Informix has since produced it as Media360, which runs on top of the Informix Foundation2000 object relational database. Video indexing and capture are done with Virage Inc.'s VideoLogger, plus internally written tools.

"It has allowed us to consolidate all of our broadcast networks into one area, instead of trying to do all that work in triplicate across our networks," Ivey says. "Second, it speeds things along because we're not duplicating efforts, and our producers and reporters have all the material they need at their fingertips."

With the Internet growing as an alternative format to cable and radio airwaves, it's becoming the transmission medium for a lot of content that might otherwise be unavailable. Video Networks Inc. of Roswell, Ga., which is building Internet-based networks for old media companies, is helping one of the three major television networks put more news on the air. The network, which didn't want to be identified, sends out more than 200 stories daily to local affiliates but only 10% ever air--the rest are made available on the Net.

"They're recognizing that the Internet isn't just a transaction or ad medium. It's actually becoming a consumption channel," says Kipp Jones, director of streaming projects at Video Networks. "The broadband rollout is bringing in a new awareness. With all that digital content available, they can enable deeper research into the news and offer a deeper spread of content."

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Illustration by Richard Downs
Photo of Ivey by Mark Escher

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