You'd think ZDnet has an interest in BCST with all these bullish articles... yet another from 2/13
This story was printed from ZDNN,
located at zdnet.com.
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Broadcast.com's do-it-yourself Webcasts
By Louis Trager, Inter@ctive Week
February 13, 1999 7:36 AM PT
URL: zdnet.com
We're still waiting for interactive television's 500-channel future, circa 1994. But now, you can
brace yourself for, say, a 500,000-channel future.
Broadcast.com (Nasdaq:BCST) is readying plans that will enable everyone from affinity groups to
individual Internet users to cheaply narrowcast audio and video programming via the Web.
Mark Cuban, the company's president and co-founder, disclosed Broadcast.com's plans to a
keynote audience at the IP [Internet Protocol] Multicast Summit last week in San Jose.
Broadcast.com intends to announce - around the end of the month - an alliance with MSN
Internet Access and another, unspecified national online provider, that will allow the partners'
users to readily distribute streaming multimedia content, using multicast technology only, Cuban
said. The service should be available this spring, he said.
Cuban said after the speech that the service will be offered at no charge to users. Microsoft's
MSN declined to comment.
Cuban offered more information on the business rationale than logistical detail. Multicast-only
programming will spur users to recruit friends, relatives and others with similar interests to sign with
multicast-enabled Internet providers. Because the content will be available only in multicast
protocol, would-be listeners or viewers will not be able to gain access through conventional,
one-to-one downloads.
That will spur the spread of multicast, Cuban said. The technology emerged gradually through the
1990s to husband bandwidth by supplying a single data stream to many users.
Broadcast.com, a leading compiler of streaming Web content, will collect revenue from ads
appended to the user-supplied programming, Cuban said. Advertisers will be drawn to multimedia
programming reaching a highly targeted audience, with personalized pitches to specific audience
members not too far off in the future. A speedboat maker, for example, could readily reach
enthusiasts for such vessels, said Martin Hall, chief technology officer at Stardust Forums, which
organized the IP conference.
Broadcast.com clearly intends to create a turnkey service that even technophobes with tiny
potential audiences could use, Hall said. A budding programmer might send a tape to
Broadcast.com for processing, and participating Internet providers presumably will provide the
hosting.
Now, tasks such as encoding are chores that specialized companies like Encoding.com perform
for customers who don't want to spend thousands of dollars equipping themselves, and it can be
hard for a consumer to find a provider to host streaming media, said Jay Kim, entertainment and
Internet analyst at Paul Kagan Associates. He said another company that might be affected by
Broadcast.com's move is Pseudo.com, which creates low-budget multimedia Web programming
but doesn't use multicast. |
