WEEK 4 -February 10
CONVERGENCE
A bit is a bit. That is, a bit that represents text is made up of the same zeros and ones that are used to represent video, audio, or graphics. So any stream of bits at the user's send can be transformed into any of these media. Any digital distribution medium, such as the Internet, CDs of all varieties, magnetic or optical discs, etc., can have embedded in them a mixture of text, audio, and video. Today's PCs increasingly have the capability of displaying any of these formats, making them perform like TVs and radios.. And it is not a great leap to expect tomorrow's TV sets (see WebTV Plans High Quality Video Via Modem, below) looking more like PCs.
In the meantime, the telephone network is being use to carry more bits than ever. The cable systems, designed for analog TV, are also being upgraded to carry digital data. We already have DirectPC, from Hughes, the same folks who brought us DirectTV bringing high speed data to your home via satellite.
These trends all confirm that there is considerable convergence happening among the media. Reading a "newspaper" or "magazine" on a PC screen is part of this. Hearing the Macarena played from "within" a New York Times article is part. But this all all quite primitive to what will be. Besides asking you to read about convergence, I have directed you to some sites where we see some of the most dramatic examples: "television" and "radio" on the Web. Keep in mind that these are ":Model T" versions of what may evolve. The exciting part, perhaps, is that these tools exist at all and work at least some of the time -- over a dial up telephone line.
First, read what Negroponte has to say about convergence and multimedia in his Chapters 4 and 5
In December Creative Artists Agency (CAA) unveiled CAA/Intel Media Lab, CAA's bid for a thick slice of the growing PC-software pie and the strongest indicator to date that Hollywood and Silicon Valley's marriage of convenience might turn into true love after all. "We are all, like it or not, surfers on that growing [high-tech] wave," CAA president Richard Lovett told a crowd of bold-faced names like Jennifer Aniston and Michael Crichton. This is the agency made powerful by Michael Ovitz, late of Walt Disney and Co. Time heralded CAA's conversion in Hollywood Gets Wired.
Although CD-ROMs have long (well, long in computer years)
provided sound and motion for the PC, getting this stuff to work
over the Web requires considerable advances in data compression.
This has lots of start-up companies joining the fray to come up
with the "sweet-spot" formula. New
Software Speeds Multimedia Distribution tells about Narrative
Communications Corp., a start-up company based in Waltham, Mass.,
which has begun shipping its Enliven suite of software
programs. The software permits the distribution and viewing of
feature-length interactive multimedia over the Internet using
ordinary phone lines. If you can, download it from their
site (given in the reading) and try it out. What do you
think?
WebTV was actually in the stores for the Christmas season. It
is the first set-top box that gives turns a television set into a
Web browser, for well under $500. It has promise, but is also
merely version 1 in what will have to be an evolutionary product
Last month this upstart Silicon Valley company that delivers the
Internet via television sets announced that it has developed a
new digital compression technology that will permit users to
receive "television-quality" video over ordinary
high-speed modems: WebTV
Plans High Quality Video Via Modem
A prime-time call from New York to Los Angeles is about $15 per hour; from New York to Paris it runs about $60 per hour. Many countries bill originating long-distance calls at even higher rates.(Howard Jonas of IDT Communications, a call-back services company, quotes the price of a call from Tahiti to France at $270 per hour.) Internet access costs no more than $20 for unlimited hours (at least in the U.S.). So, we're talking about making international phone calls for free, once your called partner has Internet access. (There are even some folks working on schemes to allows us to make a call over the Internet to anyone with just a telephone. Fred Hapgood, "I-Phone," Wired 3.10. Are the telephone companies concerned? Should they be?
Seeking to ride the wave of interest in the convergence of
television and personal computing, last month Microsoft Corp.
software for creating interactive programming for TV screens and
computer monitors. The new services, such as a television cooking
show that features a chef preparing a meal, could provide an
interactive window in which viewers could
request recipes, menus and other background information, if you
don't mind breadcrumbs stuck to your keyboard :-). Microsoft Announces Software To
Create Interactive Programs
VDO Live Guide. Here's where it starts getting excited. You will need the VDO players, downloadable at the site.
2/4/97