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Gambling on the Webcast | page 1, 2
At lower data rates the Real player is in last place and QuickTime and Windows Media are similar on quality. At full frame rates and high data rates there isn't anything better than Windows Media. At one of the meetings I had at Microsoft we demo'd a 300k stream at full screen. Bill Gates looks at it and goes ... "Wow." The impression in the past was that you couldn't get that kind of experience until you got to 700k or beyond the low-end DSL modems. The reality is that we're getting pretty darn close. In two years, you'll be able to get a TV quality experience with a 300k stream. Some have accused DEN of not having a well-articulated broadband strategy. That is an extremely false impression. We have an extremely good broadband story. Because of the way we do the physical production, low-bandwidth 56K connections actually look better on our site than on some other re-purposed video sites. All our producers have to adhere to a style sheet, a set of production guidelines involving colors, patterns, motion- DEN is building an online music business called ">en." Is the fear that MP3 will cannibalize CD sales justified? I don't have an MP3 player in my car -- nor do the bulk of the cars on the planet. Until there is a ubiquitous medium for transferring music from place to place, you're still going to derive tons of CD sales off the promotional angles of the music you distribute on the Web. There are still many companies that are afraid to put music up for general download because they're afraid of losing control. DEN's philosophy is just the opposite. There are promotional songs that we'll put up that have no protection. People will just take them. We want to encourage that. The more people who sniff up that stuff, the better, since we're targeting breaking bands and distribution is the key. If we started with bands like the Beastie Boys that already have an established audience, then it would be a different dynamic. What is DEN's new music business going to look like? When you come to our site, you won't find a music button that you click and get the MP3 music experience. There are plenty of opportunities to highlight music across the DEN network, especially for our 14-to-24 target audience, since music is a key part of their culture. We may use a song in a show, or feature members of the band as performers. You might see a Limp Bizkit doing a "Rated DG" episode. There will be listening areas where you can get the stand-alone music experience, or buy the CD. The whole DEN music promotional package will be woven throughout the network. What is the Holy Grail for the online music business? The "juke box in the sky," as my friend Sam Anderson at Microsoft used to refer to it. There's enough spectrum floating around that if you had a box with a very simple interface, really only a playlist, you could say you want to play such-and-such a song, punch in a code and pull it out of the air -- at any point, any time. Several developments are coming that will allow that kind of capability. Two companies in the past year have done deals for distributing music via satellite. Also, with digital television coming on strong, there's going to be the ability to transmit a lot more data. You may be sitting at your PC and (assuming it's affixed to a DTV-receiving antenna) get everything that Led Zeppelin has ever done in a single transmission. Jim Banister of Warner Bros. Online is an advocate of WebDVD hybrids, what he calls "broadband in your hand." WebDVD is a strategy where you put most of the fat video elements on a DVD and ship it to the consumer, who uses the disk to have a seamless MPEG 2 experience integrated into their Web activities. Are you considering this approach? No question, the WebDVD experience is awesome. The issue is that WebDVD is a two-step process. The downside is the extra step involved -- content acquisition. A consumer either has to go out and get it, or you have to carpet-bomb them with DVDs. I'm not discounting the strategy. We may decide in the future to pre-populate PC's with our video content, so that it comes with your lovely Dell box. Some people believe that online entertainment won't be compelling until we have full screen, full motion video delivered over the Web. We don't believe that a complete full-screen video experience is the way to go on the Web. A quarter-screen video with a bunch of nice, interactive stuff offers a different experience. The interactive elements are really key ones for the audience we are after. This 14-to-24 aged audience is the first group of people that have had access to computers their whole lives. They're mouse freaks -- they click on everything. When you put little unmarked bugs on the site, these people find them. If you want a full-screen video experience, go to your television or rent a DVD -- don't sit at your computer. What is your greatest fear? Success. If you are successful in a business that relies on streaming media, your success breeds infrastructure problems. The producers of the Victoria's Secret Webcast claim that millions of people saw the show. What most of those millions saw was video-on-demand, not a live webcast. If someone were to draw 100,000 users simultaneously streaming the same Webcast ... It would bring down the network? Right. Until multicasting gets enabled across the Internet, there will be bandwidth and scaling issues. How long will that take? Five years. Router configuration is the biggest hurdle. We're working on an old network: The more people that get connected to the network, the more routers. Every router that the content flows through has to be multicast-enabled -- and not all routers are configured that way. Some networks, like UUNET, have large multicast-enabled pieces, but the general Internet that comes into people's homes has big chunks that need to be fixed. The sheer volume of routers on the planet means that it will take a long time. What interim kinds of changes in network architecture are being taken to increase network capacity? If a consumer in Miami has to go 17 hops across the Internet to get to a data source in San Jose, you can't stream to him at a very high data rate because the network doesn't support it. The key is putting your content out on the edge of the network, so that somebody in Miami has only one hop to get to their content. The buzz word in network technology over the next year will be "distributed architecture" -- getting your content out to the edge. What is the one thing that consumers would be most shocked to learn about in this world of streaming media? Most people don't have any idea the number of computers it takes to serve streaming video to an audience. You can maybe get 600 to 800 streams off a box at low data rates. Compare that to sites that get 40 million page views per month. It takes 15 to 18 servers just to service those little webcam-based sites like the Jennicam. I think a lot of people think streaming video works just like television: You just put one server up and people go get it.
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