Media - the future of the ‘Net?

Word has it that Video and Audio are what will keep the Web alive. David Dorn examines the ramifications for AOLers

The dot-com bubble having burst – according to all the pundits – it would seem that the WWW is no longer the cash cow it was hyped up to be three or four years ago. Companies that hitched themselves to the dot-com bandwagon attracted huge sums of money from venture capitalists, and many of them promptly spent the lot and went bust.

Today, there are many dot-commers trying to eke out a living by selling stuff on e-commerce sites (like Amazon, for instance, which has only just shown a profit for one quarter – and over $500 million loss for 2001). It seems that, according to the people who should know, Video and Audio are the way to go, and that’s what we’ll be having fed to us as surfers.

Video

The one thing about Video over the Web, though, is that it takes up huge amounts of bandwidth if it’s to be in anything approaching decent quality. It’s not that it’s difficult to embed onto a page – it isn’t, and we’ll show you how to do it later this week. No, it’s the file sizes and modem/connection speeds required. As ever, you see, the Web is driven by the US, and since they get broadband (ADSL and Cable) very cheaply in comparison to UK prices, they’re starting to push video much more.

Now, at this point, I’ve got to say that Broadband does make life much easier when it comes to “Rich media” content. I can quite happily play a video at 640x480 on my machine, streamed over the Internet, and since that’s a better resolution than you’d get from a VHS recoding (200 lines) it looks quite nice.

The trouble is, I can’t say I’m too keen on sitting at a PC to watch in interesting movie. Video is great for illustrating points in an otherwise textual environment, but I’m not so sure that it’s a good idea to stream feature films to a PC. We shall see, on that one.

Music and Audio

Now, I don’t know whether it’s me, but I’ve noticed a lot more sites featuring an audio track as default when you enter them. Mostly, they’re MIDI files. Mostly, they’re OK, but they can sound awful on PCs equipped with mickey mouse sound facilities.

I’ve come across one or two that stream a wav file as their pages open, which is OK, but, again, heavy on the bandwidth. I‘ve been working on the band Web site, and having seen all these other sites (not many of which were anything to do with music) started to consider a musical background to the site. So far, I’ve resisted it, because the site opens very quickly, and that, to me, is the way it should be – to put a wav behind it would slow the whole thing down enormously for the vast majority of AOLers and other surfers that connect via modems.

On top of that, we now have “legal” alternatives to the lines of Napster to consider. It seems that the record companies are now looking to punt their wares at us over the WWW. I have no problems with that, I have to say, but I’m not sure how profitable it will be for them – and you can bet that if there’s no money in it, it will pretty soon be stopped.

Bandwidth

At the end of the day, Rich Media as a concept really does require Broadband connections. The fuzzy picture, small size and poor quality you get from online video at normal modem rates does very little to enhance your surfing experience. Regular use of sites that feature it only serves to move you towards ADSL or Cable – or ISDN at the minimum.

Once Broadband Britain is a reality, rather than a pipedream, then maybe Rich Media sites have a real future. Until then, they’re really only going to serve as a frustration!

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David Dorn