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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The growth in the use of streaming media has fueled the growth of networks dedicated to handling audio and video. Video streams can consume vast quantities of bandwidth, even with the most advanced compression technology, and can easily fill almost any transmission link. That's why Akamai, Digital Island, Kasenna, and other companies have begun to build separate networks to handle streaming media.

Kasenna was spun out of Unix vendor SGI (formerly Silicon Graphics) in January to create a streaming-media network. "We learned that when you're trying to get video to scale to the masses, you need an architecture that bypasses the Internet," says Neil McGowan, VP of sales and marketing for Kasenna, in Mountain View, Calif. "There are too many delays on the Internet to allow the video to come out on the other end in high quality."

Most of these networks are taking the one-to-many approach. Digital Island recently announced it is working with Compaq, Intel, and Microsoft to build its infrastructure to support up to 7.5 million simultaneous media streams. Akamai has built an enormous worldwide network of more than 4,000 servers on 160 Internet backbone networks, and plans to grow to 8,000 servers in the next few years.

Most experts believe high-quality, fully interactive, two-way video won't be possible for several years. "You're limited to the bandwidth of the Internet," says Srivastava. "Two-way communication between two people might work, but when you get to three or four or more multiplexing connections, the bandwidth issue is still not solved."

E-Media of New Canaan, Conn., disagrees, and is building a two-way network of its own. The other companies "are all betting on one-way, and they're wrong," says John Engel, e-Media's CEO. "The successful business model requires transaction processing, merchandising, ad serving, and ad management, and all of those things require a dialogue with the customer."

Each month, e-Media serves and manages more than 10 million streams of on-demand video through its BAM3 (Broadband Activated Merchandising) network and has the capacity to handle 1.4 million transactions per second. It has developed technology to combine streaming media with E-commerce by serving up banner ads and click-through advertisements. Business-to-consumer companies can add a merchandising tie-in to a pay-per-video event such as wrestling or a concert, and the ad can be pushed out at the most relevant moment for people to make the purchase, Engel says.

For enterprises looking to get involved in providing streaming media content, there's software to create, edit, manage, and deliver the content. But most of those products aren't very sophisticated and no vendor is offering a complete editing and management package, analysts say.

Some content creation and management tools, such as Digital Broadcast Manager from Microsoft, RealProducer Plus 8 from RealNetworks, and Media Cleaner Pro from Terran Systems, are small-scale products not suited to enterprise-scale media editing, say users and analysts. "There's no end-to-end solution," says Ramnarayan. "That has been a problem, to a certain extent. I'm seeing a lot of businesses outsourcing for hosting, encoding, and streaming rather than doing it internally."

However, startup Anystream in June launched a content-management platform called the Agility Enterprise Encoding Platform that tries to fill that gap. The Agility Enterprise Encoding Platform handles the input of audio or video from any source and manages it all the way through the production pipeline to digital output on the Internet. In addition, users can use any editing or management tool of their choice along with the AEEP. Because it takes video from analog sources, it's friendlier to video professionals not used to using computerized tools.

Formatting is done through Media Markup Language. MEML is based on Extensible Markup Language and handles encoding and deployment of the video, whether it's in Real Player, Windows Media Player, QuickTime or another format. It can make multiple streams all from the same video source.

MEML handles the different parameters of the different codes used by different players so editors can create output for multiple-media formats from a single interface. Formats or bit rates can be changed with a mouse click. "The biggest problem in the streaming-media landscape is that it's more of a train wreck than a convergence," says Geoff Allen, president of Anystream, in Sterling, Va. "It's an arduous task to transfer media formats. It's a manual process with a lot of point products."

Vendors predict that streaming video will continue to grow on the consumer side since it has proven to be an effective way to attract and retain Web-site visitors and customers, while business use will eventually expand.

"The winners will be the sites with the most integrated services," says Sadaranganey, "that let you reach out to the biggest audience."

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Illustration by Richard Downs
Photo of Engel by Giorgio Palmisano

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