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Content--Star Wars debuted movie trailers on Apple's Quicktime Website in four different sizes and resolutions. Narrowband users were offered a small version of the trailer around 2.5 MB (about four minutes to download completely via a phone line) all the way up to a large version, which was 42 MB. Despite the larger file offering prohibitively lengthy downloads, most users, regardless of connection speed, chose to download the largest available version of the trailer, saving it to watch again and again in anticipation of the movie's release. Trailers for both of these films broke previous download records in a very short time. Only events with a large, well established fan base could expect to receive such attention. Likewise, the original shorts produced in conjunction with the Matrix franchise, while not directly meant as advertisement for the upcoming sequels to the popular movie, do just that. It also keeps interest alive in the overall plot while giving the viewers new content that would not otherwise be covered in the movies themselves. This, in a sense, is ideal content for the Internet: unique, engaging subject matter that enhances other offline media.
Proprietary Software--This brings us to yet another hurdle to video on the Internet: standardization. There are three different major video applications on the market, with a handful of secondary ones in the periphery. Microsoft's Windows Media Player, Real's RealOne and Apple's QuickTime all deliver audio and video in streaming and downloadable formats to their audiences. All three players offer a free downloadable version of their applications that were on the majority of Windows and Macintosh computers. Complicating things further, these applications are upgraded often in order to provide improvements to the quality of the video delivered, which means unless you update your software regularly, you could suddenly find yourself unable to view new content being published.
The burst of technology's financial bubble has slowed its expansion, but it certainly will not kill it. Companies are searching for viable solutions right now to deliver video content.
Internet video distributors are in search of the ideal method to deliver content to the consumers without losing money. Pay subscriptions are on the rise and by now familiar to most end users, whether they have actually paid for access or not.
For example, news and sports outlets, which make up a large section the online video distribution market, have begun charging users to access video content. CNN takes a video on demand approach, charging users to access certain forms of content, while providing others for free. Such Websites as ABC and NASCAR have also had to move to a subscription-based delivery method to offset the cost of putting video on the Internet regularly. Though we are a long way from a perfect solution to paying for online video, companies like Real are on the right track, offering a package known as the "SuperPass," which allows viewers to watch content on multiple sites using Real Video by paying in advance to view video on approved vendor Web sites. This will be adopted more in the coming years.
This pay as you go method, however, still depends on a model of instant accessibility--that is, you see something you like, and you watch it. Surprisingly, a method has existed for collecting video for consumption for some time but never implemented effectively until recently, but you won't find it on your desktop. It's on that other video appliance: your television.
The last two years have seen an explosion in the new technology of personal digital video recorders, also known by the popular Sony brand name Tivo (although other services exist such as Sonicblue's ReplayTV). These operate primarily as a digital VCR, recording your predetermined choices to a hard drive for playback at a later time. Because this technology is integrated with an Electronic Program Guide, recording your favorite shows becomes as easy as flipping through a TV Guide.
A particularly exciting part of this technology is that it can begin picking programming for you. Based on the shows you tape regularly, Tivo can record other shows with similar genres or your favorite actor for you to view. As you review the Tivo collected content, you can approve or disapprove of its choices with a thumbs up/thumbs down system, thus increasing the personalization of the system's selections. This is very similar to how technology known as an aggregator works on computers. The term aggregator was originally used to describe Web companies such as Yahoo! that combined content from multiple online sources. Recently, however, new software (known as personal aggregators) has been used to collected online content from numerous Websites via XML feeds for display in a customizable single interface, making it possible to consume information from a number of Web sites quickly, without ever using a Web browser. These personal aggregators like AmphetaDesk, FeedReader, Meerkat and NetNewsWire are not only being used to shared information from traditional news Websites, such as CNN, BBC and the New York Times, but they have also become wildly popular amongst those who follow Weblogs. These "Blogs," as they are known, are online journals that organized by chronological order. It is a Web page that can be updated instantly by the user, and followers can respond with their comments just as quickly.
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Created: May 2, 2003
Revised: May 5, 2003
URL: http://webreference.com/multimedia/webvideo
