NAB talks convergence

The spring meeting of the National Association of Broadcasters heard FCC Chairman William Kennard downplay the Internet's challenge to broadcast television-and then produced a crop of announcements intended to speed streaming media and converge digital television with the Internet.

Kennard told the NAB audience in Las Vegas that the traditional broadcast networks have the asset that telcos, cable companies and Webcasters want-a big pipe to bring content into every home.

Multimedia Internet suppliers such as Broadcast.com may try to improve their service offering with Internet protocol multicasting, improved compression and innovative distribution models. "But in the end, what they're really trying to do is to come up with a good point-to-multipoint model-and that's another word for broadcasting," Kennard said.

Just before Kennard's address, RealNetworks announced that it will ally with a pack of Internet backbone, service and broadband providers to assemble a distributed architecture for sending multimedia over the Web more efficiently.

The company's Real Broadcast Network division will co-locate broadcast hubs around the Internet: with carriers Sprint, AT&T, GTE and Teleglobe; with ISPs Concentric Networks, EarthLink, MindSpring, IDT, Verio and Southern New England Telecommunications Internet; and with broadband provider Enron Intelligent Network. Managed from RBN's broadcast operations center in Seattle, the new hubs will let RBN avoid network bottlenecks and route traffic more intelligently to users of its RealPlayer software (see figure).

"This will offer faster downloads and higher quality to media viewers," said Gary Antchuk, an analyst with Bitstream Associates. "That will kick things up a notch for Webcasting generally [because] RealNetworks currently has about 60 million desktops and an 85% market share of the streaming media on the Internet." A distributed architecture is necessary because of the inefficiency of the Internet in its present form, where peering problems and congestion lead to latency, drop-outs and connection failures.

"Those issues will need to be solved before Web audiences reach television numbers," Antchuk said. "But in the short run, moving content as close to the user as possible is probably a good answer."

Meanwhile, Intel Corp. entered a multiyear agreement with NBC to develop and distribute interactive content for digital TV programming over an array of platforms.

Under the agreement, NBC will license from Intel the software needed to insert interactive features into the programs, including electronic program guides, quizzes, sports scores, stock quotes, movie trailers and NBC show promotions. The NBC-Intel partnership will probably take advantage of NBC's equity stakes in Snap, CNET and on-demand video service VideoSeeker in assembling the content.

In other show news, Sun Microsystems announced that its Java TV technology will be incorporated into ACTV's HyperTV software. ACTV's application allows TV-Internet convergence over a range of set-top boxes, digital TVs and PCs; the company has already signed agreements to integrate its application into next generation set-tops from General Instrument, Scientific-Atlanta and Pioneer Digital Technologies.

Finally, several companies, including TV pioneer Sarnoff Corp., are pushing TV broadcasters to do datacasting via high-definition television signals-and the potential to become ISPs. inTelecast, a joint venture, will provide a nationwide data broadcast infrastructure and content for digital TV broadcasting to the PC. Venture partner The Fantastic Corp. will supply software for downloading various content types, while Wave Systems' technology will handle copyright fees.

Sarnoff also demonstrated how the use of a TV tuner card in a PC can allow broadcasters to offer high-speed Internet access. Broadcasters could fund the necessary network upgrades through subscriptions, pair up with portal companies for content and enable advertisers to track viewing of ads over TV-equipped PCs.

GI also announced that it will offer broadcasters WavePhore's software for delivering Web content to TV tuner cards. GI will aggregate content from the Internet, allowing broadcasters to tailor it to local viewing areas.