Sydney based Internet media company, Webcom, has launched what it is calling Australia's first commercial Netcasting studio in a joint venture with ad agency Singleton, Ogilvy & Mather.
The Netcast Studio has been developed by Webcom as an interactive, multimedia broadcasting studio, featuring audio and video streaming facilities plus chat and audience response facilities to enable interactivity between programmers and their audiences.
Webcom's managing director, Tracy Ebbetts, said that the he development of the Internet as a broadcast medium has huge potential, and Webcom is attempting to lead the Australian market.
"Commercial growth in Internet broadcasting is inevitable," she noted. "Some radio stations have started to broadcast over the Web, but the challenge is to take this further into real-time Netcasting. Too often the Internet is looked on as merely as a delivery tool for Web sites, whereas its potential as a broadcast medium is limitless.
The studio also boasts home-grown technology that facilitates high quality transmission over the Internet according to Webcom's technical director, Richard Morgan.
The company has developed the Multicast Optimising Router (MORO) software, which identifies ISP hardware configurations in order to utilise 'multicast' hardware. Multicast hardware allows for the more efficient distribution of data, however not all ISPs have the appropriate technology installed. Morgan said that the identification of multicast users allows for the targeted delivery of streaming media with more efficient transfer of data and clearer picture quality overall.
"In Australia, 80% of our Internet networks are multicast capable, which is much higher than in the United States where only 10% of users are multicast enabled because the infrastructure is older, our objective was to find an intelligent way to maximise the capabilities of this advantage, which turned MORO into quite a sophisticated challenge," he stated.
The Netcast studio is a joint venture with John Singleton's advertising agency Singleton, Ogilvy & Mather and cost about $500,000 to establish.
