by Gary Welz
New Streaming Media Standard
This past Monday, October 14, Netscape Communications Corp and Progressive Networks Inc.--creator of the popular client-server system for streaming audio, RealAudio--said they and 40 other companies had agreed to a proposed open standard governing delivery of real-time multimedia information over the Internet.The new standard is being supported by leaders in the industry, namely, Apple, Cisco Systems Inc, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, and Macromedia.
Jeff Pulver, of the Voice On the Net Coalition, says that this is a great thing for the industry and will move the entire Web multimedia business forward.
The standard will be transparent to users except that they will enjoy a more reliable delivery of information and an overall improvement in service. Pulver says, "It's an agreement on protocols, not a codec. It doesn't mean that all the media files types will be inoperable although that could fall out of this."
The new standard, known as the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), evolved from work done at Progressive Networks and Netscape, and is a communications protocol for control and delivery of real-time media. The agreement pertains to issues like latency, reliability, quality, fidelity, and packet loss.
The development of this standard can be compared to similar standards efforts in other broadcast media such as FM, or Frequency Modulation, in radio and the NTSC, or National Television Standards Committee, which is the U.S. and Canadian television standard for broadcast quality video. Widespread support for this unified standard is considered crucial to ensure interoperability and gives software developers more flexibility in developing multimedia programs.
"Until now, each vendor of Internet multimedia systems had a different approach, which has led to confusion," said analyst Jerry Michalski, managing editor of Release 1.0, a computer industry newsletter. "This, combined with the impressive group of industry-leading companies that support RTSP, should catalyze streaming media development on the Web."
The RTSP is designed to minimize the amount of data necessary to produce high-quality sound and pictures over the Internet and anticipates the convergence of telephones, videoconferencing, and multimedia broadcasting.
This standard is another step toward fully integrating all existing forms of broadcast media with the interactivity of the Internet. Cable modems and ADSL modems are expected to bring high bandwidth connectivity to the home during the next two years. The RTSP is as essential to the creation of the high-band multimedia as the wire and modems.
