Broadband Week for April 19, 1999
Media Streaming Moves Heat Up
By FRED DAWSON April 19, 1999
Two new initiatives on the part of suppliers of multimedia-streaming technology promise to significantly increase the presence of Web broadcasting and the availability of full-screen entertainment media in the high-speed-access market.
RealNetworks Inc. is set to announce this week a major expansion of its "Real Broadcast Network" that will employ new technology to support fast delivery of live events and other programming to both broadband and narrowband customers of affiliated Internet-service providers.
At the same time, The Duck Corp., a less-publicized supplier of a competing streaming technology, has created a new entity, On2.com, which will put together a network of sites devoted to delivering content developed exclusively for broadband users, including full-length movies.
RBN -- which was begun by RNI in 1997 as a means of improving distribution of Web broadcasts using the "RealSystem" streaming technology -- will now be able to deliver broadband-compatible content via the nationwide high-speed backbone under development by Enron Communications Inc., a unit of power company Enron Corp., RBN general manager Ian Freed said.
Freed added that RBN is also implementing a new architecture that will speed distribution to narrowband customers by placing unicast "splitters" at points on the backbone networks of Sprint Corp., GTE Corp., AGIS (Apex Global Internet Services) and Teleglobe Communication Services Inc., as well as in the local points of presence of affiliated ISPs.
Freed said the company was also negotiating with unnamed entities to provide multicasting capability for broadcast events.
The multicasting capability will support efficient point-to-multipoint delivery of content to customers within reach of the multicasting facilities. And the new unicast mode will ensure availability of content over the full reach of the Internet, while reducing "hops" through the bottlenecks of Internet interconnection points to a maximum of one per unicast, Freed said.
This is done with network intelligence and splitters, allowing a broadcast to go out on a point-to-point basis over the most direct routes to the points of intersection between the Internet backbone and the links that connect affiliated ISPs' POPs.
The signal is repeated and sent in unicast mode over these links to the local ISPs' POPs, where it is buffered in RAM (random-access memory), split again and repeated for unicast to each individual user.
"Only one feed goes into each ISP, which, because the broadcast hub is colocated at the POP, allows thousands of users to be served without requiring multiple streams from the source," Freed said.
The first ISPs to sign on for placement of the new broadcast hubs in their POPs were Concentric Network Corp. and Verio Inc. "We expect other deals [with ISPs] to close in the next few days," Freed added.
RNI already has a deal as supplier of streaming technology for the nationwide broadband-IP infrastructure that ECI is putting in place. And now, through RBN, RNI will work with the carrier to line up affiliates among ISPs that are making use of DSL (digital-subscriber-line) facilities to connect their customers.
Enron's system is designed to support streamed media at rates of up to 1.5 megabits per second for mass-market applications and to manage the integration and operation of content from multiple suppliers for efficient distribution to ISPs' POPs, said David Berberian, vice president of engineering at ECI.
"We are making it easy for ISPs to put together broadband-service packages that can give them a distinct presence in the local marketplace," Berberian added.
Using proprietary middleware -- or software that ties various types of applications together over networks -- ECI runs real-time intelligent-messaging technology that allows content suppliers to use and be billed for only the capacity that they need, when they need it, and to deliver material at tiered rates fitting the specifications set in agreements with individual ISPs.
Along with 15,000 route miles of wavelength-division-multiplexed fiber links, ECI is using satellite hops to enable delivery of content to any ISP, regardless of size or location, Berberian said.
Freed declined to name new content partners that will exploit the high-speed and streamlined narrowband components of RBN's distribution system. Current customers include ABC News, ZDTV and America's Health Network, he noted.
The key to running the RBN system is a centralized intelligence system that identifies the closest points of connection and sets up the links so that a unicast is delivered over a single route, rather than the multiple routes typically taken by IP-packet files.
The "RealSystem G2" technology is an important component, as well, as it allows each unicast to be delivered from a single file at whatever bit rate is optimal for a particular ISP, including the broadband rates over the ECI backbone, Freed noted.
RNI also said last week that it was acquiring Xing Technology Corp., a leading supplier of MPEG-based Web-streaming systems, in order to beef up its arsenal of options in the G2 system.
While the primary reason for the acquisition was Xing's leadership in the supply of MP3 audio-streaming encoders and decoders, the ownership of MPEG video technology will definitely be a plus in RNI's broadband content efforts, said Phil Barrett, senior vice president for media technology at RNI.
"Their encoding technology is very high-quality," Barrett said, noting that RNI has been using an MPEG system from another supplier in instances where its customers want to encode in that format. G2 -- which embodies many capabilities in addition to the streaming function -- is designed to work with multiple types of compression techniques, Barrett noted.
"You can plug MPEG into our architecture -- it's a very straightforward thing to do," Barrett said, adding that RNI is working with @Home Network to develop a streaming system exclusively tailored to that high-speed-data provider's architecture.
But while MPEG is a strong contender in the broadband Web-distribution field, partly because so much material is formatted in MPEG, RNI is not betting that the technology will be the leading means of compression as the broadband content arena expands, Barrett said.
"We looked at this issue when we designed G2, and we decided that it was best to accommodate multiple technologies, because there's no way of knowing what the next cool thing is going to be," he added.
In strong contention to be the "next cool thing" is the broadband version of Duck's streaming system, "TrueMotion VP-3," which is based on wavelet-compression technology.
More efficient than MPEG and other compression systems based on cosine transforms, wavelet compression is widely used in Internet applications and various multimedia applications, such as Sega Enterprises Ltd.'s "Saturn" game system and its next-generation video-game platform, "Dreamcast."
The On2.com broadband network that Duck is preparing to launch will stream video at 640-by-480-pixel resolution and 30 frames per second, which is TV quality, On2.com president Dan Miller said. "The sites on our network are for people who want more television from their Web experience and more interactivity from their television experience," Miller added.
On2.com will launch in the fourth quarter with an initial site devoted to offering TV-quality video-on-demand, Miller said. Content partners will be named later, but one clearly interested party is Miramax Films.
Brian Dickman, Miramax's senior vice president for new media, offered a ringing endorsement of On2.com in a prepared statement, suggesting that the new entity "appears to deliver what the movie industry and movie fans have been waiting for since the inception of the Internet -- full-screen, high-quality video on the Web."
With the capability to deliver such material in the 1-mbps range over DSL lines using wavelet technology, ISPs will have still another source of content that they can target in the entertainment market, where they have not been a presence.
Combined with the activities fostered by RNI in deals with myriad content suppliers, the emerging ISP entertainment package could have a significant impact on the cable market, noted Jonathan Cohen, director of research at investment firm Wit Capital Corp.
"We believe that deployment of broadband connectivity to the consumer market will represent the most profound change across the Internet space since the creation of browser software," Cohen said. "Our view is that companies that have built models that take advantage of broadband-based content and data streams will enjoy a substantial competitive advantage on that basis."
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