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February, 2002 THE NET |
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Video through the Internet offers TV devotees the independence to pause and resume playing programs even as they are being transmitted and recorded By Neil McManus Cable television executives have been promising video-on-demand for years. Somebody should tell them it is already here. The other night I hooked audio-video cables from my PC to my television. Then my wife, Emily, and I sat on our sofa and watched full-screen, full-motion videos through our broadband Internet connection. Although far from DVD quality, they looked and sounded as if we were watching regular old television. Why get video through the Internet when you have hundreds of channels on cable or satellite TV? One reason is the difference between a lot of choices and a staggering number of choices. Consider our night of online viewing: On Cinemanow (www.cinemanow.com), we saw the so-bad-it's-good horror movie "Leprechaun", which is usually relegated to the wee hours of TV. On Intertainer (www.intertainer.tv), we watched a music video from the Mexican rock group Cafe Tacuba, which you will never find on MTV. The Molly Ringwald sitcom "Townies" lives online at Yahoo Broadcast (http://broadcast.yahoo.com) even though ABC cancelled it in 1996 after only half a season. And the video shorts on iFilm (www.ifilm.com) were made for the Net by hobbyists with camcorders and video-editing software.
Hooking our new Compaq PC to our 10-year-old television set took some work, but it turned viewing Net videos into a social experience. You don't need to take this step to watch video full-screen on your PC monitor, but you will need a relatively powerful PC. Intertainer, for example, requires a PC with Windows 98 or later, the Internet Explorer browser, a 400-megahertz processor, 64 megabytes of RAM and a broadband Internet connection. Most video-on-demand sites also support newer-model Macs as long as they have the latest Web browsers and the latest version of RealPlayer, QuickTime or Windows Media Player. The videos at the Web sites we visit-music videos, shorts, television shows and vintage movies-are not pirated, but most are free. (Yahoo Broadcast and iFilm, however, will make you sit through lengthy and boring commercials before you view a video.) To watch recent motion pictures, concerts and sporting events, you will either pay a monthly subscription fee ($8 to $10, Rs 385 to Rs 480) or pay as you go (typically $2.99, Rs 145, or $3.99, Rs 190, for a 24-hour rental). To some, all this may seem like taking a vast wasteland to new extremes. But for video devotees, it is a sneak preview of a Promised Land where you have the ultimate in control over what you watch at any moment. On Intertainer, I can watch the 1974 title fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, the Rumble in the Jungle. Pausing it with a click of the mouse, I can go to MovieFlix.com (www. movieflix.com) and choose a "Dragnet" episode. Or switch over to Burly Bear Network (www. burlybear.com) for my favourite Chicken Lady sketch from the comedy troupe Kids in the Hall. This do-it-yourself video-on-demand experience is something like using TiVo's personal video recorders, which let viewers pause and resume playing TV programs even as they are being transmitted and recorded. The video quality, however, is not as nice as TiVo's. (If your cable or DSL connection slows down, the streaming video available over the Web may look grainy and even come to a halt while the media-player software restores the connection-a phenomenon known as buffering.) And a bigger difference is that you are not recording; your PC is using a broadband connection to play digitised videos that somebody else has put on the Web, and you are watching them remotely.
If you are venturing into the world of Web video for the first time, a good place to start is iFilm, an addictive site that assembles entire movies, TV episodes, comedy sketches and music videos. The iFilm site is best known for inventive made-for-the-Web video shorts, like "405: The Movie", in which a driver frantically tries to get out of the way of a jetliner making an emergency landing. The site makes it easy to send links to video clips by e-mail and encourages viewers to post comments. Over at Yahoo Broadcast, you can watch an eclectic mix of streaming videos including celebrity interviews, TV shows, movie trailers, music concerts and instructional and travel videos. Yahoo showcases videos culled from lesser-known sites like Wild Brain and Classicmovies.com. Yahoo also offers a handful of full episodes from the sitcom "Townies", "The Andy Griffith Show" and other programmes. If you are eager to step into a TV time capsule, LikeTelevision (www. liketelevision.com) offers full episodes of long-cancelled shows like "The Beverly Hillbillies", "Bonanza" and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents". As for full-length feature films, CinemaNow offers 150 movies free,-mainly B-movies, like "Killer Klowns From Outer Space" and "The Wolves", though you will also find classic films, like "The Kid", as well as Hong Kong action movies, including "No Sir" and "Oh Yes Sir". CinemaNow also rents movies for online viewing. For $1.99 (Rs 95), you can watch "The Toxic Avenger", starring a hideously deformed creature with superhuman strength. For $2.99 (Rs 145), you can watch "Double Down". The site offers an unlimited monthly pass to its premium films for $9.95 (Rs 480). As it happens, Cinema Now's investors include Blockbuster-an intriguing association, since video stores could lose out if pay-per-view movies through the Net catch on, as could cable and satellite-TV providers. The movie industry has a more fundamental reason to want to tame the medium: to pre-empt the online pirating of movies that Napster made possible on a viral scale with music. President of the Motion Picture Association of America Jack Valenti told Congress that 350,000 movies were being downloaded "illegitimately" every day. At the same time, though, the studios clearly see the Web as a lucrative new means of distribution. Intertainer is the first site to show movies in what the film industry calls the "first-run pay-per-view window". In December 2001 it was renting "Cats and Dogs" and "Swordfish" at the same time cable pay-per-view channels were. Intertainer charges $7.99 (Rs 385) a month for its basic programming service, plus pay-per-view fees of $2.99 (Rs 145) to $3.99 (Rs 190) a movie. This year Intertainer may get competition. A soon-to-be launched pay-per-view site, Moviefly, is being backed by such Hollywood studios as Sony Pictures, MGM, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios and Warner Brothers. Walt Disney Co. and 20th Century Fox have not yet agreed to distribute films through Moviefly-perhaps because Disney and Fox are planning a competitive Net video-on-demand service through Movies.com. Neil McManus, New York Times News Service The
Indian Connection By Sudhir Chowdhary
Fast Internet access, better video and graphics, and interactive video and data content might be the done thing overseas, but in India the dismal speed at which data is transmitted and received might even make a tortoise feel decidedly hare-like. Poor connections, painful dial-ups and pathetic access speeds are very much the order of the day, even as an increasing number of Indians realise the potential of the Internet. Compounding the problem is the fact that ISP-grade networks are woefully dependent on the DoT (Department of Telecommunications), whose inherent bottlenecks include minimal scalability. Besides network reliability, the speed of application deployment is a major stumbling block for Indians seeking quick access to the Net. A look at the bandwidth available in India can perhaps put things in a better perspective: It is merely 325 megabits per second (Mbps) as against 10 gigabytes per second (Gbps)-that's almost 31 times as fast-in most of the developed world. Though ISPs have gone in for fast Ethernet, and gigabit levels in their applications, they would have to go a long way to deliver the real power of the Internet to their users. It is in an attempt to make available greater bandwidth that powerhouses like Reliance, Birla-AT&T-Tata, and Bharti Enterprises are piping the length and breadth of the Indian landscape. "What is forgotten is that all this requires and depends on a very strong telecom infrastructure, specially the availability of adequate bandwidth," says Sunil Mittal of Bharti Enterprises. And if these telecom infrastructure providers have their way, increased bandwidth will soon see the entire country opening up to the Net-driven markets. And with adequate bandwidth and infrastructure in place, broadband applications like video-on-demand would be enabled by technologies that provide dramatically faster Net access, in some cases hundreds of times faster than regular modems. The three popular methods for faster access are:
Internet through cable The concept that is gaining maximum currency is Net access through cables, though prices still remain steep. Here, cable TV wires are attached to a cable modem-an external device that connects to the PC to provide high-speed data transfer. This modem interfaces with the PC and brings the Internet via cable technology. The benefits of this technology: your phone lines remain free; you can have an "always on" Net connection; no dial-up and password problems; and you can download text and heavy graphics files at twice the speed. Moreover, one can access the Net on one's TV set, by using a set-top box. A set-top box decodes and tunes digital signals before converting them into a format that can be followed by a TV set. In India, Jadoonet, a joint venture of Salora International and Infoquest E-commerce, offers its product-Jadoonet Classic-for Rs 5,400 with freebies that include 25 hours of Net surfing and four to five e-mail IDs. Experts are confident that unlike in the West, where Net-via-cable didn't take off, the technology would succeed in India-mainly because of the high TV-PC price differential. Net through cable is being currently used in corporate offices and upper-class homes. But most of the retail target market doesn't know much about this technology. And the one-time expenditure for a cable modem (Rs 15,000) and installation fees, besides a flat monthly and additional charges for extra downloads don't make it a compelling buy for small entrepreneurs, either. |
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