Two years ago at the height of the great Internet boom, streaming media experts envisioned a world where a million Internet channels would deliver TV-quality video — news, entertainment, and movies on demand — to people's desktops.
We saw websites like pseudo.com, mediatrip.com, den.com, and ifilm.com spring up to offer fresh, original, video-rich entertainment fare. While the video quality was poor, the potential seemed so huge that even broadcasters rushed to publish their TV video news and features on their own websites out of fear that the Internet medium might erode their TV audience. The expectation was that soon everybody would have the ability to be a broadcaster.
Streaming 21, with its real-time content delivery software, has enjoyed success providing streaming solutions to the corporate market.
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But today, the reality is that the number of Internet channels offering streaming video-on-demand to consumers is still low. And instead of being dot.com pioneers, pseudo.com and den.com were among the dot.com casualties of the tech sector meltdown.
One big reason the dream of web-based entertainment never blossomed is that the TV-quality video experience that so many experts promised never materialized. Even today, with a 300Kbps DSL connection, users rarely can get anything better than a 4in.-square video window with barely-VHS quality video. And even at that, it's not unusual for the video stream to become interrupted, making it a risky proposition to attempt to watch anything longer than a five-minute clip.
The primary culprit that's been hampering TV-quality video over the Web is bandwidth — the size of the “pipes” that determine how much data-intensive video can pass. There's also the “last mile” problem that involves the way a home is connected to an ISP network. Today, the majority of people still have only a 56Kbps web connection at home. Due to the high cost of building and upgrading cable and DSL networks, the deployment of high-speed services has been slower than expected. Nielsen estimates that only 21 million American homes, or 20% of Internet users, now have high-speed Internet access.
But, as noted before, even the lucky minority that have a high-speed connection can't get what can be truly be called a TV-quality experience. Screen sizes are still small, and bandwidth constraints still limit most videoclips to about 10 minutes. Beyond that is the fact that content providers are reluctant to distribute their branded content over the Web without stringent digital rights management and security assurances.
So, with bandwidth and rights issues unresolved, streaming media experts now say that delivering a TV-quality experience over the Web to a PC is still at least three to five years away.
A Promise Fulfilled
It's important to note, however, that the limitations affecting the public Internet do not necessarily apply to other IP (Internet Protocol) networks, such as corporate intranets and closed, private VOD (video-on-demand) networks. If private IP video networks have been designed or upgraded to handle the bandwidth demands of HDTV, then even HD-quality video can stream reliably to a PC or HD television set with a set-top box.
Whereas the public Internet is an unruly, congested, global network of hops, POPs, and other connections that cannot be controlled, private IP video networks can be managed to ensure sufficient network performance and bandwidth to deliver whatever quality and quantity of video needs to be streamed.
Today, many large corporations are seeking to improve productivity by streaming video over high-bandwidth intranets for videoconferences, training, and other video communications. (See “The New Conferencing,” page 43.) As a result, the corporate, or “enterprise” sector of the streaming media industry is surviving.
For example, EDS (Electronic Data Systems) in Plano, Texas, regularly streams fullscreen, TV-quality video over its intranet, which reaches 140,000 employees in 58 countries. To accomplish this feat, the company relies on scalable, realtime content-delivery software from Los Gatos, Calif.-based Streaming21 and its associated Media Caster v4.0 multichannel video encoder. As an IT services provider, EDS considers its IP video infrastructure critical to keeping its geographically dispersed staff informed, while holding down travel costs.
Another rapidly expanding sector of the streaming media market where the promise of TV-quality video has been realized is the VOD market, where video is streamed over IP networks to set-top boxes and PCs. On private IP-based VOD networks, like the ones installed by Cequent Technologies, the data rates, server performance, bandwidth, asset management, and other factors can be customized to handle simultaneous streams of full-length movies and TV shows.
This is possible because Cequent's turnkey VOD networks offer a robust 6Mbps of uninterrupted bandwidth. And instead of the Internet's thousands of miles of cabling, Cequent's networks only have to carry video thousands of feet, from a central server to every room of a hotel, resort, hospital, condominium, campus, or any other location employing Cequent's integrated solution.
“With our proprietary content-delivery system, we're able to stream full-length DVD and HDTV movies reliably using MPEG-2 compression. And not only can everyone watch the same movie or a different movie simultaneously on HDTV monitors, they can even control the playback,” says Paul King, Cequent's president.
“But this demanding VOD application could not be done over the public Internet because its backbone infrastructure wasn't designed to support such high-bandwidth streaming,” adds King. “If you can't control the server or network performance, you can't guarantee delivery of a TV-quality viewing experience.”
Of course, it's not just technical problems that contribute to the challenge of putting TV-quality video on the Internet. There are other roadblocks as well. For example, since entertainment services are costly to provide, there must be a viable business model to support them. But because of the Web's limited bandwidth and broadband audience, conventional revenue generators like subscriptions, pay-per-view, and advertiser support have yet to be proven viable.
Competing with RealNetworks and Micro-soft in the codec market is On2 Technologies, which claims to have seen its revenues grow 100% in the last year on sales generated by its VP4 codec. Warner Brothers and Texas Instruments are among its clients.
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There are also costs associated with the bandwidth that's consumed. While viewing videoclips online is generally free to end-users, content providers are often paying their ISPs hundreds of dollars per month depending upon the volume of data streamed from their sites. This actually creates a disincentive to stream high-quality video.
Codec Competition
Then, of course, there's the need to encode the same video into different bit-rates (56K, 100K, or 300K) and into different media-player formats (RealNetworks' RealVideo, Microsoft's Windows Media, Apple's Quick Time) in order to accommodate all the variations out in the marketplace. This creates an overhead cost that's difficult for would-be web entertainment sites to swallow.
If ever TV-quality video is going to make its way onto the public Web, one of the things that will help make it possible is codec technology — the technology used to compress video files to make them pass more quickly through pipes with limited available bandwidth.
RealNetworks and Microsoft have been vying for years for market dominance for their respective proprietary codecs, which are part of their comprehensive delivery solutions for streaming media content. Although most people would probably agree that Real and Microsoft codecs produce a comparable viewing experience, many interviewed for this story say that Real's codec produces a smoother video playback, while Microsoft's offers better picture quality.
For the end-user watching streaming media over the Web at 250Kbps to 300Kbps — considered the minimum for a good streaming media experience — both Real and Windows encoded media plays back inside a 2in.- or 3in.-square screen with playback controls.
And again, depending upon the quality of video encoded and the server and Internet performance, the video quality that an end-user receives can range from broadcast quality to essentially that of a fast slide show.
While RealNetworks and Microsoft both want their own proprietary codecs to become the worldwide standard for streaming media, they recognize the need to optimize their players for competing proprietary and open-standards-based codecs.
With that in mind, Real Networks recently licensed the VP4 codec developed by On2 Technologies in a deal worth $1 million. In the last year, On2 realized 100% revenue growth largely owing to the use of its VP4 codec by its growing customer base, which includes Warner Bros. and Texas Instruments.
ABCnews.com, home of Sam Don-aldson’s online news show, is just one of the many websites that relies on RealNetworks’ codec to deliver streaming video and audio.
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“With this deal, if a content provider prefers VP4 and wants to encode with it, they'll now be able to do that and have it play back on Real's players,” says Douglas McIntyre, president of On2. At press time, the full implementation of VP4 with Real's technology was expected to be completed imminently.
To get a feel for what the VP4 codec can do for video quality, you can go to the video section of On2's website, where there are movie trailers (for Spy Game, Beautiful Mind, and others) encoded in VP4 at 100K, 300K, and 700K, plus a link for downloading a VP4 player.
With VP4, entertainment-grade video plays back in a window that fills about one-quarter of the PC screen. And when the user takes the video to fullscreen, the enlarged picture does not appear to lose much resolution.
“When encoding with other codecs, producers often limit the user's ability to make the video go full-screen because they know the picture quality will quickly deteriorate,” says McIntyre. “But with VP4, what you get is better quality video at lower data rates, which translates into substantial savings on delivery costs.”
Ed Gillespie, On2's vice president of marketing, estimates that VP4 offers a bandwidth savings of 60% to 70% over MPEG-2, considered by many to be a bandwidth hog.
Gillespie says, “For MPEG-2 to deliver full-screen, DVD-quality video, you need bandwidth of about three to six megabits per second. But VP4 can do it in under one megabit per second, and this efficiency saves content providers money.”
The MPEG Wars
Like RealNetworks and Microsoft, On2 is also hoping its codec will become the worldwide standard for streaming.
However, Mark Tayer, senior vice president of business development for San Diego-based Aerocast and a former member of the MPEG-2 standards committee, doesn't think that will happen.
“It's a flawed strategy to think that any proprietary codec will prevail over an open industry standard like MPEG-4, which has the preponderance of the world's intellectual properties and engineering expertise behind it. MPEG-4 is coming in like a freight train. It's unstoppable,” Tayer says.
MPEG-4 will allow for a superior picture using far less bandwidth by softening the resolution around the edges of the picture and concentrating more resolution on the center of the frame where the eye is focused. (For more information on MPEG-4, see “MPEG-4 Makes the Scene,” page 59, in the March 2002 issue of Video Systems.)
“MPEG-4 over IP has substantial bandwidth advantages over traditional MPEG-2 for VOD,” Tayer says.
It enables fullscreen, entertainment-quality video at 750Kbps while providing the industry with open standard interoperability and interactivity, he says.
While 750Kbps is still faster than the connection speeds consumers can get, that bandwidth can be obtained on robust private IP video networks, a market that Aerocast considers promising for its solution. At high bandwidths that yield TV-quality video, Aerocast, which is backed by Motorola and Liberty Media, incorporates sophisticated digital rights management and other security measures to prevent piracy.
Until advanced MPEG-4 is implemented sometime this year, Aerocast will continue to use Microsoft's Windows Media, which already supports MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video, MP3 audio, and other open-standard formats. Besides advancing its codecs toward HDTV resolution, Microsoft is also implementing MPEG-4 in its streaming media solution as well.
Bursting the Edge Caching Bubble
While pursuing codec improvements is one way that vendors are hoping to improve the quality of streamed video, Burst.com is focused on another approach.
When media streams over the Web, it arrives like a broadcast signal meant to play out in realtime. To compensate for the Web's network congestion, most streaming media players buffer the first few seconds of the video into your PC's RAM to ensure enough of a head start that the video will play back without freezes, jitter, or other disturbing glitches.
As an alternative to realtime streaming, Richard Lang, chairman, CEO, and co-founder of Burst.com, says his company proposes a new kind of media delivery network. This system looks for openings in network traffic, then bursts as much data as possible through to ensure that the end-users' local cache (or buffer) is always full for uninterrupted playback of the file.
Lang also says that bursting is a smart alternative to “edge caching,” the practice of putting extra servers out near the outer ring of the network where the end-users are. The theory behind edge caching is that, by placing duplicate copies of media onto servers located closer to the end-user, the number of Internet hops is reduced and the streaming media experience is improved.
“Here's the fallacy in edge caching,” says Lang. “Every time you take one step closer to the network's outer circle, the circumference increases, and so the number of servers you need to deploy increases exponentially. But if you use the storage that's already there on the ‘true edge’ of the cloud — on the end-users' PCs, which they are already paying for — it's more cost-effective.”
The cost of building bigger, better content delivery networks, where streaming media is improved through edge caching, has contributed to the bankruptcies of many companies in the last couple years. For example, at press time one of these companies, Globix, a New York-based ISP and streaming media service, was struggling under $75 million in annual interest payments to its bondholders.
When BMW North America chose to sponsor some short films on its website, www.bmwfilms.com, it relied on Apple’s QuickTime Pro codec to create a near DVD-quality experience for viewers. Here, director John Franken-heimer (left) confers during the shooting of Ambush, one of five movies that currently can be seen on the website.
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But, Lang says, “Licensing Burst to ameliorate delivery of media directly to end-users is very cost-effective compared to the huge capital investment in servers that edge caching requires. When people say the cost of streaming is too high, what they are really saying is that the cost of being stuck in an outdated paradigm is too high.”
Luxurious Pictures
Another way around the Web's bandwidth roadblocks is not to stream media at all. That's the approach Apple has taken.
With Apple's proprietary QuickTime Pro codec, media isn't streamed into the PC, it's downloaded by users right onto the PC's hard drive. Once downloaded, the QuickTime movie file can be accessed and played anytime, like recording a TV movie on a VHS recorder.
Because there's no need to compress the video to stream over the Internet, and fit through the end-users' 300Kbps broadband connection, content providers can transfer large files, like a 5MB trailer or a 70MB short film.
When played from the user's hard drive, Quick Time movies can produce a riveting fullscreen entertainment experience. The only thing left to want is the comfort of your living room.
Since it preserves the content's visual impact, the QuickTime Pro codec was chosen by BMW North America to encode the short films in its Internet Film Series at www.bmwfilms.com. Among the titles for download are short films like Star, by director Guy Ritchie, Ambush, by director John Frankenheimer, and Chosen, directed by Ang Lee. All of the short films on the website are displayed in 16:9 letterboxes, with near DVD-quality video on your full PC screen.
Picture quality was a key criterion for this venture because the movies are really a vehicle to show off BMW's luxury cars in action sequences, such as chase scenes.
“BMW is synonymous with thrills, excellence, and technological innovation,” says Tom Purves, president of BMW North America. “These entertainment-driven films are the perfect showcase to underscore the excitement and uniqueness of the BMW experience.”
In some ways, then, Apple has probably come closest to delivering on the promise of providing TV-quality video over the Web. But it's clearly not the perfect solution, since the download times can be considerable. And so the struggle continues.
With MPEG-4 now out in the world, things promise to get interesting. Certainly the industry has been anxious to have a worldwide industry-standard format that can scale to meet a variety of resolutions and data rate requirements.
Having a single media player format would streamline IP video content distribution; reduce costs for content providers and end-users; and focus the world's engineering resources to fuel advancements in codec technology, for a better, more pleasurable viewing experience.
Still, not everyone is convinced that MPEG-4 is the answer. And with Apple, Microsoft, Real, and On2 all still eagerly pursuing their own strategies, it's any-body's guess as to how the quest to deliver TV-quality video over the Web will ultimately play out.
