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Does streaming media need standards?

Rich Mavrogeanes ZDNet.com

Published: 03 Nov 2003 13:10 GMT

In 1964, it was easy to believe that the "Picturephone" that was demonstrated at the New York World's Fair would be in every home in just a few years.

By the summer of 1969, we were convinced that humans would be waltzing around Mars by now. In the mid-1990s, conventional wisdom would have you believe that your local supermarket was obsolete and that you would be buying everything online.

Well, few homes have anything that resembles a Picturephone, humans have not landed on Mars, and local retailers are still doing nicely. As baseball great-cum-pop philosopher Yogi Berra is reputed to have put it, some things are hard to predict -- especially the future.

But even a modest inspection reveals another truth. Humans, via robotic proxies, have landed on Mars. The US Department of Commerce recently reported that US e-commerce has grown 27.8 percent in the past year to $12.48bn -- that's some $50bn annually. And certainly, more than just a few of the half-billion people who are connected to the Internet have experienced streaming media. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, more than 72 percent of Internet users do more than just surf the Web, and popular Internet activities include watching video clips.

But streaming video and videoconferencing have not yet quite challenged the quality, simplicity or ubiquity of commercial television. Why?

Streaming media was born to deliver audio, then audio and video, over the Internet. As with many new technologies, it started with single-vendor proprietary techniques. This was the case in the early days of television, too. But since television involved the use of the public airways, the Federal Communications Commission was charged with establishing standards.

Happily, a standard emerged relatively quickly, and television has grown to the ubiquitous state we have today. One can only imagine how different the world would be if you had to purchase a different television set to view each channel or if only one vendor owned the dominant technology that's required to view public broadcasts.