GOODIES TO GO! ™
April 26, 1999 — Newsletter #25

Greetings, Weekend Silicon Warriors…

Again, I have to stop and thank you all for the e-mail I
received regarding Newsletter 24 (re: my OpEd being printed
to the Web). I’m sorry I wasn’t able to answer many of them,
however I did read them. I was away in Las Vegas and am just
now finding time to write the newsletter for this week. My
editor at EarthWeb, Lindy, is a stickler for deadlines.

Did you see that Yahoo! Magazine came out with their top
100 most wired colleges and universities? Congratulations
to Case Western Reserve for topping the list! The rest of
the top five were MIT, Wake Forest, New Jersey Institute
of Technology, and Rensselaer Polytechnic.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Ah, Vegas. The concept of that town just amazes me. We
come, we eat, we leave a lot of money behind, we leave.
It’s so simple a concept. Bugsy was right on target with
this idea. My wife and I stayed at a brand new hotel called
The Bellagio. What a place. Miles of water and meticulously
kept greenery. I was told that the hotel cost 1.6 billion
to build and that the owner paid for it with cash.

If so, he’s $100 lighter thanks to me. I never gamble. I’m
just flat out bad at it. I never win and am smart enough
to know that putting $20 on a roulette table is like
lighting it on fire. But this time was different. My
wife had to step into the ladies room for a short while
and I was left surrounded by the ring of the one-armed
bandits. I caved. I had a fresh one-dollar bill in my
shirt pocket so I shoved it in and pulled the handle.

Ba-da-bing!

I won $100! My wife returned to the constant sound of
dollar coins plopping into the metal tub below the slot
machine. What a glorious mechanical sound! We saw the
show and then went to dinner at a very expensive steak
house. My steak alone was $24, but it was the best I’ve
ever been served. The fact that it was free made it all
the more tasty.

But what does Las Vegas have to do with Goodies and the
Web? Well, the reason I went there in the first place
was to attend the National Association of Broadcasters
(NAB) yearly conference. This is the time when anyone
who’s anyone in broadcasting sets up a booth and
attempts to sell the latest and greatest in broadcasting
equipment and theory. It is a completely unbelievable
sight. The booths go on for miles and the flash and glitz
is almost unbearable.

So where is broadcasting going? Well, first off it’s
blatantly obvious that broadcasters want to go digital.
They want to broadcast, tape, and edit literally
everything by computer. Videotape is going to way of the
dinosaur. I saw at least 20 different programs that were
created to edit videotape. I know 15 of them will fail.
That’s the way it always goes. When an idea gets hot,
the world puts out product. Businesses buy them and
somewhere in the mesh a winner or two is declared. The
also-rans are left with a lot of unsold boxes.

Digital broadcasting was also a hot topic. I got to see
HDTV for the first time. I saw flat screens that had the
definition of 35mm photos. It looked like you could reach
your hands inside of the picture. You’ll never believe
how great the images were until you see it for yourself.

I watched a television studio being created out of whole
cloth. The anchor stood in a three-walled room that was
totally blue. The lighting was set so that there were
almost no shadows. Some of you might already understand
the concept of chroma-key. That’s when you take a blue
(or green) background and “replace” it with another image.
It’s done all the time in TV weather forecasts, but this
went a step further. The anchor was standing in a blue
room, yet on camera he was in a fully functioning TV
studio with people in the background and carpet on the
floor. When he walked, shadows were thrown by his feet
and you actually saw his shoes sink into the carpet.
When he talked about the five-day weather forecast —
pillars came up and out of the floor and he walked
between and around them. You had to stop and look back
at the blue room to be sure you saw what you just saw.

I worked with a digital camera that created real-time
3D effects. The camera could create depth and within that
depth create effects that appeared to move within the
picture, like a butterfly that appeared to fly past the
announcer’s head and back into the screen. It looked
like you could reach into the screen and touch things
that were behind the announcer.

There were companies that offered multiple methods of
getting radio air signals to the Web. I worked radio for
11 years before going back to school for my Ph.D. In my
time in radio, I made the decision that the best station
in the U.S. was 102.5 WDVE in Pittsburgh. You may not
agree. Right now I can listen to the DVE and a multitude
of other stations anywhere in the world as long as I have
a connection to the Web. And the sound was phenomenal. The
compression ratios allowed for immediate streaming and CD
quality sound. Granted, the display had very expensive
speakers running off of the sound card, but I could see
myself listening with what I have.

Up until this point, everything that I have been talking
about is in practice. Formats are getting to the point
where standards can be granted. What is not yet written
in stone is broadcasting television over the Web.

In what was either a scheduling joke or a colossal
blunder, the booth for Microsoft “Windows Media” streaming
video was right across the corridor from the Real.com
booth.

“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” screamed the
Real.com sign.

“Why Wait?” blared the signs above the “Windows Media”
booth.

I stayed in that little area for a good hour talking with
the presenters. One actually knew the Goodies site! I was
in ego heaven.

The Real.com booth handed out key chains, buttons, and
pins pushing their G2 compression format. The big push on
their flyers was that you only needed three things to start
streaming video:

1. The Real Player G2

2. The Real Producer G2 (the software that creates the
files)

3. The RealNetworks Basic Server G2

The paperwork offered just enough information that it
sounded easy enough for a home user to do. I took it that
was Real’s push. Anyone can do it. Even the smallest ISP
could get this stuff up and running.

“Microsoft Media” was pushing their new Advanced Streaming
Format (ASF). All in all, Microsoft won in the promotional
battle. They likened streaming video to drinking milk right
out of the carton. I know it sounds absurd, but it worked.
They had a giant cut-out of a kid holding a milk carton
above his head and “streaming” the milk into his mouth.
The display had to be 40 feet tall and, yes, there was
real milk running from the carton into the mouth. To
drive home the point, the promotional giveaway was a pint
milk carton with a cow sounder inside. If you turned the
carton upside down and then right again… it mooed. Of
course, there were the obligatory “Got ASF?” take-offs on
the Got Milk? campaign.

Their big push, I took it at least, was toward bigger
business and broadcast houses using this format to stream.
The process worked off of the NT servers and creating the
streaming format was just a simple download away, much like
the pitch from the Real.com people.

So there are only two big players, right? Wrong. Just down
the lane, past yonder snack bar, was TVONTHEWEB.com. They
were pushing narrowcasting specific programming on the Web.
Then there were a slew of companies that were offering
levels of video-on-demand programs. With these systems you
could request any movie or television show and it would
start immediately. It looked like Spectravision for the
real world.

It was an experience that only went to show me how much
advancement was really going on. All of the major companies
were there, but then there were the booths put together by
a couple of young guys in tie-dye shirts and jeans. You
just know they sunk every last nickel they had into this
booth. They had a piece of software that they believed
would revolutionize the world of video. I hope they make
it.

Me? I’m going to take the time to read every piece of
literature given to me. What I took away filled four
canvas bags. (One bag is just full of pens, buttons,
chocolates, and other assorted promotional items the
booths were giving away: I got four of the little mooing
milk cartons!)

TV on the Web is here now, but it’s not yet been decided
how exactly it will happen. That may take a few years.
Until then, keep an eye on the technical section of your
local Sunday newspaper. Hopefully you’ll get a glimpse of
what I saw in Vegas this past weekend.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

And that’s that. Thanks for reading. I sure do appreciate
your taking the time.

Joe Burns, Ph.D.

And Remember: A font is considered “True Type” when the
letters are created through a series of mathematical
formulas rather than being a simple bitmap. The benefit?
True Type fonts can be made huge and never pixelate and
always print as they appear on the screen.