Swimming upstream

SAN FRANCISCO--At the first Streaming '98 conference held here last week, convergence loomed large over the audience as the Holy Grail of the streaming media industry.

In one sense, streaming audio and video over the Internet already have made a great stride toward convergence with traditional broadcast media: With the advent of streaming media, the Web started to look and sound more like television and radio.

But as simple as the marriage of old and new media sounds on paper, the specific tasks of bringing together the traditional broadcast and Internet content industries--their infrastructure, protocols, and hardware--are daunting.

Before the nascent industry makes significant inroads on traditional broadcast media markets, battles loom on standards, bandwidth, the development of viable business models, and the resolution of intellectual property issues.

Streaming media to serve TV--and then swallow it
Streaming industry insiders differ on what exactly this convergence promised land will look like once it is found, and how long it will take to track it down. But most agree that it will have a profound effect on both merging industries.

"There will be a slow convergence of digital television and the Internet, but it will be a decade or more before...that happens," Zona Research research associate Greg Tapper told Streaming '98 participants in a panel discussion. "But when it does happen, TV as we know it will be gone."

So far, despite studies showing the Internet as a whole siphoning off traditional media consumers, broadcast industries have treated streaming media as tools to be exploited rather than as threats. An overwhelming consensus among old and new media professionals alike is that the only significant point of convergence between television and the Internet for the present and the near future is the use of streaming to augment traditional on-air programming.

This current auxiliary role of streaming media illustrates one of its primary benefits: Whereas television and radio are rigidly time-constrained, Internet multimedia content is held back only by the limitations of server and bandwidth resources. That gives broadcasters the opportunity to post complete materials, such as President Clinton's videotaped grand jury testimony or independent counsel Kenneth Starr's report on the White House sex scandal. The complete materials serve to augment the limited coverage provided in an evening news broadcast.

In addition to depth and background, streaming media offer users choice in when to watch it.

"The single most important thing the Internet has going for it is being on-demand," said ZDTV president and chief executive Larry Wangberg during a Streaming '98 panel discussion. "I don't have to wait for some programmer in Hollywood to tell me when to watch something. This gives users control the way the automobile did...suddenly the driver is in control."

For some broadcast television businesses, streaming media have been recent additions to existing programming. CNN Interactive, for instance, averages 100,000 multimedia streaming requests per day, and topped 1 million hits per day for its posting of the Clinton testimony and the launch of the space shuttle with Sen. John Glenn.

For recently launched television operations such as ZDTV, streaming over the Internet was a key part of the original programming plan.

"The company realized there was a real business opportunity with the coming convergence," ZDTV's Wangberg said. "There was a real need for video to go along with Web content."

Companies using streaming within the consumer marketplace are largely those that produce video- or audio-based content in the first place. According to Forrester Research, TV-oriented companies lead the pack, followed by music sales, radio, sports, and film firms.

The streaming market opens up niches for small Net firms that want to get in on the TV act. One such company is UltimateTV, which uses streaming media to provide online sneak previews to television shows.

Indeed, much of the promise for streaming video in the near future is in promotion. Full sound and color can create compelling ads and higher click-through rates for advertisers across the product spectrum. Streaming media producer Veon reports click-through rates of as high as 20 percent for multimedia banners--a stratospheric leap over traditional banner click-throughs.