CAI mentioned... (interesting article, but poorly written -- what do you think, Ken?)
Internet broadcaster announces video-on-demand deal
By Joe Nickell
Friday March 27 4:44 PM EST
dailynews.yahoo.com
SAN FRANCISCO (Wired) - Xing Technologies, an also-ran in the race to develop streaming media for the Internet, has announced a deal with a computer TV startup to offer what both firms insist will be near-broadcast quality video on demand for home users.
Xing says right up front that it doesn't expect the technology to have much of an impact anytime soon.
Analysts and competitors go further: They express skepticism at a strategy that amounts to trying to get first in line to fill a technology niche that might not really appear for several years.
"This is a bit before its time in this country," admitted Tom Adamski, Xing's director of marketing. "We're trying to establish the next generation of digital video streaming and broadcasting."
"They're talking about building a new entertainment paradigm, but the question is, who has the high speed Internet connection today?" asked Ron Rappaport, an industry analyst at Zona Research. "The majority of home users don't have it."
Both Xing and partner SimplyTV concede that their full-screen, full-motion video offerings won't reach many households when the service rolls out.
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Computer users will need the capability to receive data streams in excess of 200 kilobits per second -- far faster than the top end of 56K for most users. That will limit the market to those few who have Internet access via cable modem or digital subscriber lines.
According to Forrester Research, that market will only encompass some 700,000 homes by year's end.
But it's a market that all agree will eventually come to maturity, with Forrester predicting some 15.8 million high-bandwidth home connections by 2002.
For now, SimplyTV isn't sitting on its hands. The company says that it will license 1,000 original streamed video programs by midsummer, viewable as low-bandwidth streamed video using Real Networks' RealPlayer.
Currently its Web site (http://www.xingtech.com) broadcasts more than 750 hours of streamed media, and company CEO Krystol Cameron claims that the Web site is averaging 800 to 1,650 new visitors a day.
"What makes us different is the ability to provide our programming in such a way that consumers themselves don't have to be tech savvy," said Cameron. "We cross boundaries from the couch-potato generation to the interactive generation."
To cross those boundaries and bring bandwidth-hungry, high-resolution entertainment video to home users, Cameron and company plan a complex set of technology partnerships.
The agreement announced today allows SimplyTV to leverage Xing's StreamWorks streaming software, bringing MPEG-1 format video to end users.
Xing is widely known as the founder-and subsequent loser-in the streaming video market. The company introduced StreamWorks in June of 1995, but was quickly eclipsed by the success of RealNetworks' RealVideo streaming software.
"The market we created was taken by RealNetworks because of their highly efficient infrastructure and their focus on the constraints that were present on the Internet at that time," Adamski conceded.
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But with high-bandwidth Internet access slowly coming home to a broader market, Adamski believes Xing is once again poised to compete in the marketplace.
"We chose the MPEG-1 standard because it's just that: a standard," Adamski said. "A year or two ago, the Internet wasn't capable of handling the bandwidth requirements of MPEG. But now that that's changing, we have a great opportunity to leverage our understanding of this format."
Bandwidth issues at the network level are still a concern to SimplyTV.
"One of the problems with the Internet right now is the bottleneck in routing technology," said SimplyTV's Cameron. "We therefore plan to bypass that."
The company plans to enlist Internet service providers to downlink SimplyTV's digital video feeds from satellites, thereby circumventing Internet backbones. The Internet service providers then will feed the video to home users on high-speed connections.
Cameron declined to name satellite or Internet services partners, saying only that "the relationships are in place" with about 20 "national and international-level service providers."
He did, however, note that SimplyTV will partner with CAI Wireless, the nation's only licensed two-way Multichannel Multipoint Distribution System (MMDS) wireless Internet service provider, to give users in CAI's New York markets wireless access to the high-bandwidth video feeds.
Asked why he believed none of the more likely players - such as RealNetworks, Microsoft, or AudioNet - had targeted high-bandwidth streaming capabilities to home users, Cameron said most other companies aren't prepared for the difficulties of the market.
"It's hard to justify a revenue model for this kind of business," he said, noting that advertising spending is low on the Internet and virtually non-existent in streamed media.
Analysts agree on that point.
"The advertising models for the Net right now are pretty weak - it's not a lot of money in comparison to traditional TV," said Mark Hardie, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. "For streamed media, the cost of putting it out there seems prohibitive."
A potential SimplyTV competitor argues that the project is missing a crucial ingredient - the key that Cameron company that lack that sense.
"It's like me saying that I'm gonna start the next cable company to compete with NBC, but not having any distribution," said Mark Cuban, founder and president of AudioNet, a Dallas-based competitor in the streaming media content market.
"Anybody can support broad-band streaming; it's another thing to actually reach people. To what I've seen at this point, neither of those companies have those infrastructure mechanisms in place."
In the end, analysts are similarly skeptical. "Until the end-to-end dataflow concerns are addressed, no matter how good the services are or the content that's offered, there's a flaw in that business model," said Zona's Rappaport. (Reuters/Wired) |
