News June 29, 06:22 Eastern Time
SAN FRANCISCO (June 29) BUSINESS WIRE -June 29, 1998--Zing Network Inc., a unique new online entertainment network, Monday introduced its first product, the Zing player, a new Internet-based application designed to relieve the "World-Wide-Wait."
Recently named the Best New Idea on the Web at Variety Magazine's Interactive Summit, Zing is the only Internet program that displays user-selected, short entertainment, including images, animations and sound, to Internet users while they are waiting for Web pages to load. Introducing Zing
The Zing player is a free download that works as a companion to Netscape and Microsoft (including IE for AOL) Web browsers. The player displays fast, fun shorts, or "Zing spots," whenever a user clicks on a Web link and waits for a page to load.
Zing immediately minimizes when the new page appears -- so the program entertains waiting users without ever slowing down Web browsing. The program is particularly well-suited for home Internet users using modem or ISDN lines.
"The most ubiquitous Internet experience is waiting," said Mark Platshon, Zing's CEO. "People connecting online via modem typically wait from 5 to 40 seconds for a page to load. We developed Zing to bring some fun to that wasted -- and often aggravating -- down time.
"We estimate that in the U.S., nearly a billion hours will be consumed in 1998 waiting for that next page to appear. If we can make even a small fraction of that time useful or enjoyable, this product will be a huge success," he said.
Zing currently features 10 content channels, ranging from music and movies to art and language. Web surfers can personalize Zing by selecting from these channels, according to their interests.
The channels feature a variety of individual spots, many of which were developed with some of Zing's partners including Rolling Stone Music Network, Billboard, Universal Studios, Surfer Magazine, Car & Driver, Road & Track, Premiere and Chronicle Books. Zing will continue to add channels and content as new partnerships are formed.
"We are really excited about Zing. The Rolling Stone Network is always looking for ways to provide the best online musical experience to consumers," said Howard Katz, COO of the Rolling Stone Music Network. "Zing is a great tool to offer instant music and reviews from Rolling Stone and to highlight features of our Web site." Smart-pull Technology
Zing uses an exclusive technology called "Smart-pull" to automatically and invisibly download content from Zing's servers when users connect to the Internet. With Smart-pull, new content automatically replaces old Zing spots, so the channels are always kept fresh.
Zing spots are built using Macromedia's Flash technology, which can include images, animations and sound, and which automatically scales to the size of the browser window. These spots are small -- between 10K and 90K each -- and include a coded expiration date, so the program never clutters hard drive space.
Smart-pull takes advantage of idle time -- when users are reading Web pages -- to perform its downloads. Zing communications are always the lowest priority and stop automatically if the user clicks on a Web page. In addition, the Zing player also uses Smart-pull to update itself, so users never have to download Zing more than once, and always have the latest version of the player. A New Advertising Medium
The Zing Network is advertising-supported, and Zing is committed to limiting the total amount of advertising to no more than 10% of total Zing content. This is far less than the nearly 1-to-1 advertising-to-content ratio that pervades the rest of the Web.
In addition, Zing delivers full-page "rich-media" advertising, the combination of images, animation and audio that has been shown to be remarkably more effective than banners in both building brand and generating click-thru.
In addition, Zing's customized channel selection allows advertisers to target specific audiences who are interested in their products and services. System Requirements
-- Pentium class PC with 16+ MB of RAM
-- Windows 95, Windows 98 or Windows NT 4.0
-- Microsoft IE 3.x/4.x, Netscape Navigator 3.x/4.x , or America Online (version 3 or higher)
-- 15 MB of available disk space
-- VGA video (or better), 640x480 resolution (or better)
There are currently no plans for a Macintosh version. Availability
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