A new streaming-media standard promises to unify a fractious market, but inferior quality and bureaucracy may block acceptance.
Strong market forces are pushing for a standards-based resolution to the high-profile battle of proprietary streaming technologies pitting Apple's QuickTime, Microsoft Windows Media Technologies, and RealNetworks' RealMedia against one another. Broadcasters are seeking a unified standard that will allow them to use a single delivery method for both traditional programming and Internet offerings. Many publishers of electronic content see users of PDAs, cell phones, Internet appliances, and set-top boxes as a vast new audience. But multiple device-specific technologies create an overwhelming development and support burden. Reaching such a diverse community will require a single content-delivery mechanism that can easily adapt to work with an array of devices and scale to suit the bandwidth of a variety of mediums. That's the promise of the Moving Pictures Experts Group's recently ratified MPEG-4 standard.
Until recently, the fanfare surrounding Microsoft Windows Media Technologies, QuickTime, and RealMedia made MPEG-4--the successor to the ubiquitous MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video standards--easy to forget. (MPEG-3, originally intended for HDTV but now undefined, was folded into MPEG-2, which proved capable of handling HDTV and eliminated the need for a new standard.) But MPEG-4's wallflower status ended in December 2000, courtesy of a 27-company alliance forged by Apple, Cisco, Philips, and Sun. The group's initial goal was to create a specification for streaming audio and video over IP networks. This brought MPEG-4, with its powerful, object-driven approach, to the fore.
As streaming media moves outside the Internet Protocol sandbox into wireless, broadcast, satellite, and cable arenas, the need for an inter-medium negotiation protocol becomes paramount. The requirements lie far beyond the scope of current proprietary streaming technologies; fortunately, those needs are precisely what MPEG-4 was designed to address. Unfortunately, inferior quality and unrealistic licensing requirements may create significant barriers to the technology's acceptance.
The MPEG-4 Solution
The best way to appreciate the MPEG-4 vision is to understand the problem it's designed to solve. Imagine you're the head of programming for a major television news network. You reach your audience primarily via traditional, high-bandwidth means such as broadcast towers, cable, and satellite, so the quality of delivery is excellent. You also provide a feed to your Web site for real-time streaming, but delivery quality over the Internet ranges from acceptable to dismal, depending upon the recipient's connection speed.
Over a 28.8-Kbps connection the video is awful, and the audio is merely passable, as you'd expect. But even the stock ticker, which seems to be nothing but text (and looks great scrolling across the bottom of a TV screen), turns to visual mush, as do sports scores and captions. The problem occurs because the various separate sounds, pictures, and text elements are merged into a single information feed before they're sent, so a low-bandwidth connection degrades the whole.
There's also no way to promote e-commerce or just plain stickiness, because you can't turn individual elements into hyperlinks. For example, you'd love to link the stock ticker to a library of company data or let the viewer jump from sports scores to more detailed articles, but because there are virtually no individual elements, you can't. (Closed captioning is a separate element, but no standard has been set for streaming such content.) And you certainly can't reach wireless devices, Internet appliances, set-top boxes, Dick Tracy watches, or other systems with unique requirements unless you create a separate stream to feed each. Even then, owners of such gadgets must go to separate URLs, and you're saddled with more to create, manage, and maintain.
6%
1%
