Lot's of hype in today's Times. nytimes.com
July 13, 1998
Real Networks Hopes New Software Will Open Up Medium
By STEVE LOHR
The streaming technology that allows music and video to be sent over the Internet to personal computers is still a curiosity as a medium and a puzzle as a business. But Real Networks Inc., the leader in streaming software, is making announcements Monday that represent steps toward developing both the medium and its business model further, industry analysts say.
The company is releasing a test, or beta, version of its desktop and network server software that employs a new standard for streaming technology, Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, or SMIL (pronounced smile.)
In the industry, the hope is that the new format, recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium, a nonprofit arbiter of technical standards for Internet software, will open the way for a flood of streaming-media programming -- as did agreement on Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML, the document format for the Web.
[...]
Ojing. |