Although it may seem as if the road to digital nirvana gets redrawn every two weeks or so, there is a comforting sameness to some of the stops along the way. No matter what year, no matter what location, you can rest assured that any Internet technology conference will feature several hundred uber-geeks with neck badges, tote-bags and a shared belief that next year is going to be unspeakably cool.
They may disagree on exactly how to get from the tepid present to that way-cool future. But there will be no wavering on the basic premise: We’re all about to be delivered to a better place. The ability to sustain this belief, through hot years and cold, is called religious conviction.
The RealNetworks Conference late last month in Burlingame, Calif., was as good as it gets on the tent-revival circuit.
RealNetworks is a comprehensive system for moving audio and video over the Net using a relatively miserly stream of bits and bytes. This technology, called streaming media, is essentially a work-around system designed to supply passable multimedia content in an environment of clogged networks and slow connections.
And it works. Of all the audio and video add-ons that have come down the wire, this is the one that really lives up to the hype. In the three years since the introduction of RealAudio 1.0, RealNetworks of Seattle has become the de facto standard for the industry. The RealNetworks system, now it its fifth generation, combines the best attributes of broadcast (ubiquity, immediacy, low cost) with the best attributes of the Net (global reach and the ability to support an unlimited number of signals).
Lotus Development Corp. co-founder Mitch Kapor, who has presided over more of these revival meetings than possibly any other executive on the planet, told the attendees: “No tech guru can absolutely prove it, but the technological constraints (that slow streaming media deployment today) are going to go away. It comes down to faith–but not blind faith.”
He reminded the attendees that although they could not know exactly what will happen with streaming media, they could discern a pattern of growth that has been seen many times before– with the Web and with PCs. He counseled patience and perseverance as streaming media grows from bleeding-edge culture to mass culture.
The pattern is real. In June 1994, the Internet World technology conference was barely large enough to fill one of the smaller rooms at the San Jose Convention Center. The exhibit section was just three dozen hard-core Internet pipeliners, software developers and early publishers. The Web as a mass medium was pure conjecture. And content was an afterthought. But all it took was one look at the first graphical Web browser–one look and you just knew in your bones it was right.
That’s the way it was again in Burlingame. More than 1,000 developers, toolmakers, publishers and other behind-the-scenes players paid $895 apiece to be at the conference. And while they struggled at times with how all the aggregate pieces would work together, everyone seemed to believe they were witnessing the first steps of a new mass medium.
What began three years ago as an enhancement to Web publishing is now becoming a separate and distinct platform. With every new iteration, the RealPlayer client console looks less like an attachment and more like a stand-alone browser, with customization features and channel capabilities that are the multimedia equivalent of bookmarks.
In addition to its proprietary formats (RealAudio, RealVideo and RealFlash animation) the RealNetworks system can handle many other file flavors, including VRML and other companies’ proprietary encoding systems.
The most dramatic change in the year since RealNetworks convened its first streaming media conference has been the emergence of a whole community of developers building off the system. There are now dozens of small firms vying to fill complementary niches around the core technology. Last month, 48 of those companies showed off their wares. A tent pavilion just outside the main conference was jammed with every conceivable tool for authoring multimedia content, storing it, serving it and selling it.
When the Web was at the stage RealAudio and RealVideo are now, it was a common assumption that accessible, easy-to-use tools would turn it into a populist medium, crowded with citizen-pamphleteers. But, to a degree nobody could have envisioned, the Web has turned out to be a one-way feed: Content from old-media powers is pumped at an audience.
Is this in the cards for RealAudio and RealVideo? On one hand, RealNetworks’ Chairman Rob Glaser boasted that there are 35,000 sites carrying RealNetworks media today, up from 8,000 last year, suggesting that the barriers to entry that kept small operators from the old broadcast world do not apply in this new realm. The idea of the citizen-broadcaster does not seem implausible.
On the other hand, the companies who are doing the most with the technology right now are hardly garage startups. They are the biggest names from the old radio, television, print, music and film worlds. And they are using the new technology to protect and extend some franchises that are as old as the Victrola.
It’s inevitable that someday some very bright people will understand all the ways streaming media is unique. And instead of emulating old style broadcast, they will build something native to cyberspace. These new content barons were not at the conference.
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In fact, they may still be in high school.