THE FUTURE AS SEEN THROUGH TECHNOLOGY

Through the years, potential video services have been demonstrated in many dramatic ways — medical imaging has been shown to save patients' lives, video testimony has proved to serve the court processes more efficiently and personal video has united homesick road warriors with their young children.

When BellSouth decided to deploy a trans-Atlantic streaming video service, however, it chose something truly dramatic — a bi-continental stage performance that combined the talents of the Tennessee Repertory Theatre of Nashville with that of Theater Magdeburg of Magdeburg, Germany, in a joint performance of “das treffen — the other side.”

Theater-goers in Nashville and Magdeburg simultaneously viewed five actors from each city — with live actors on stage and remote actors appearing on large video screens, from projection feeds — performing together. The script involves characters who relate their life stories, so as one actor is telling the story, another one hundreds of miles away could be acting it out.

The idea originated with the Tennessee Rep, a small business client of BellSouth's for more than 20 years, according to BellSouth. Randy Lawyer, the theater's account representative, assembled a team of 15 BellSouth network experts to develop the solution.

Although the ultimate product was what BellSouth believes is the first trans-Atlantic live video-streaming production, the real breakthrough was in taking the technology and making it commercially viable for a small business customer, said David Scobey, president of BellSouth Small Business.

“The number one issue was how to do it in a cost-effective way for everyone involved,” he said. “We have streaming video technologies. And we have all the issues in a trans-Atlantic service being the different T-1 service in the U.S. versus E-1 in Europe. You have to make that stuff talk to each other.”

If BellSouth could make this work for the Tennessee Rep, however, it could do the same for other small businesses, he said.

“There are challenges in the technology, but the real challenge is figuring out how to use new and evolving technologies like streaming video to move the picture and the voice around and how to make those more available and practical for you and me in more everyday applications,” he said. “A lot of times those are pioneered with more dramatic applications, so the challenge is how do we use these same types of approaches but with the Internet or communications services that most everybody has or has access to.”

BellSouth didn't use the Internet for this production because of the unpredictability of transmission bandwidth, Scobey said. Because of the real-time nature of the actors' interaction, even a small amount of unexpected latency would cause problems. Instead it used an ISDN PRI link for the video signal and a combination of DS-1 links and frame relay to connect the backstage personnel of the Tennessee Rep with their German counterparts.

Those voice connections were simple technically but crucial to the overall project's success — not only did German and American directors have to communicate, they had to do so in real time, via translators.

BellSouth and Telekom AG, which handled the German end of the connection, also had to resolve the T-1-to E-1-conversions.

Scobey believes, however, that the streaming video technology is ready for prime time and that BellSouth's next challenge is to get that message out to its customers.

“We know how to do this today, and we need to be creating awareness of demand, getting people to be ready to use it,” he said.