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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam Citron who wrote (3050)	3/10/1999 11:56:00 AM
From: MikeM54321	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

OT-- Re: MP3 "I disagree with your comments about streaming media. Today with a relatively slow 28.8 modem, the audio quality is about the equivalent of an AM radio......" Sam, We don't disagree at all. I just didn't word my post correctly. It's so easy to make small errors in posts that give them an unintended meaning. That's one of the hazards of SI posts. I should have said, "IMHO, streaming media is equivalent to an AM radio, even with a cable modem." There are incredible uses for streaming media. No doubt about that. But I was specifically referring to the multi-billion dollar music industry being turned upside down by the Internet. I really have not seen anything that would threaten it, until MP3. As a matter of fact, it must be a big threat because there are all kinds of lawsuits being filed against the owner of the MP3 file format. The music industry dislikes the MP3 format as much as the movie industry used to dislike DVD. MP3 is very close to CD quality. I pop a music CD in my computer and I cannot tell the difference between it and a MP3 file that I play directly off the Internet. And with a cable modem, it is instantaneous gratification. Coincidently yesterday, RealMedia just agreed to make their player compatible with MP3 file format. IMHO, I think MP3 is a significant technology, but do not know how to invest in it (other than DIMD). MikeM(From Florida) PS Thanks for your list.

To: Sam Citron who wrote (3050)	5/20/1999 10:07:00 AM
From: Scott C. Lemon	Respond to of 12823

Hello Sam, I know this is a response to a post that you made a long time ago, but I have been trying to get caught up on this thread ... it moves to fast! ;-) You stated: > I disagree with your comments about streaming media. Today with a > relatively slow 28.8 modem, the audio quality is about the > equivalent of an AM radio, a vast improvement in sound quality over > the last 2 years. This sound quality is more than sufficient for > voice, webcasting, and music. Actually, with MP3 is has got much better ... and now with the new codecs being written and offered by other vendors (like Microsoft) it is getting even better! I listen to streaming MP3 day-in and day-out ... depending on where I am I choose an appropriate bit rate. At home, where I listen via a 56Kbps modem (sorry ... I moved my T1 because too many people were hanging around the house) which usually connects at 50.6Kbps, I almost always have a 24Kbps MP3 stream coming down (as I do right now) and it is better than AM. I'll listen to 40Kbps streams from time to time and they are even better. At the office I listen to 56Kbps streams and up to 128Kbps ... these are very close to CD quality ... > Granted it is not CD quality, but neither is MP3. I was curious why you would say this about MP3? 128Kbps encodings are amazingly close ... and they offer a 12:1 compression that is designed to be "lossy" around the characteristics of the human ear. i.e. losing information that the ear is not as sensitive to > The big advantage of streaming media is that a webcast begins > almost immediately after clickthrough (there is about a 5 second > buffering period). Yes ... and so it MP3 ... have you visited shoutcast.com ? ;-) > Compare that to a MP3 download, which even with a 56K modem takes > about the same length of time as the song or audio file to play. > Instantaneous gratification? Only perhaps with a cable modem. The MP3 world has grown a lot ... and is growing even more. The requirement for downloading went away quite a while ago ... (The reason that I know about this is that I've written an MP3 streaming server with some friends noizcast.com ... and it's been out there for a while being tested. We modeled it after the SHOUTcast server that was created by NullSoft.) MP3 is the grass-roots revolution in streaming audio ... now it's time to figure out who's going to do the equivilent with video .. ;-) Scott C. Lemon