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Movie to make its Internet premiere

'Koyaanisqatsi' to be multicast Sunday night.
Written by Matthew Broersma, Contributor
Is the interactive TV dream still alive after all?

It is for the attendees of an annual expo in San Jose set to begin Sunday, and the dream has a name: IP Multicast.

The third annual IP Multicast Summit will begin with what supporters hope will eventually become a common occurrence -- the Internet premiere of a feature-length movie, multicast at near broadcast quality over the Internet.

"The Internet desperately needs multicast," said Martin Hall, CTO of Stardust Forums, the event's organizer. "Ultimately everyone benefits -- the international global audience of Internet viewers and users in the corporation."

He noted that one of 1998's hottest initial stock offerings was online broadcaster Broadcast.com (Nasdaq:BCST), which counts multicasting as a crucial part of its business plan, and which is hosting the video stream Sunday.

Multicast enabled ISPs
Attendees will gather at a specially-equipped "Premiere Cafi" at San Jose's Doubletree Hotel to experience the online incarnation of the film "Koyaanisqatsi." The multicast will also be available to many users at work or at home.

Users who subscribe to a multicast-enabled Internet service provider, including Microsoft Network, Earthlink or GTE, will be able to tap into the full-quality version from the event's Web site (www.stardust.com), and a standard "unicast" version will also be available, at lower quality.

What is IP Multicast?
IP Multicast is a set of protocols making it possible to deliver high-quality video and audio files over the Internet without clogging up the network pipes with thousands of gigantic multimedia files.

The technology basically allows a broadcaster to send out a single copy of the file, which is then duplicated as necessary by software in the network itself. That makes it possible to transmit files much larger and to more people than would be possible with systems common today.

Multicasting is in use as a business tool today, and has been adopted by Internet backbone providers such as UUNET, which provides the network to consumer ISPs such as Microsoft Network (Nasdaq:MSFT) and Earthlink (Nasdaq:ELNK).

Mostly business users
"At this stage most multicast users are businesses," said DirecPC spokesman Fritz Stolzenbach. "They turn to DirecPC to stream audio and video or ticker information out to their regional offices. It's an infinitely scalable model, and today anybody with a satellite dish and an IP address can receive this kind of high-quality media from the Internet."

The protocols are already been built into much network infrastructure equipment, and are standard in multimedia players such as those from Microsoft Corp. and RealNetworks Inc. (Nasdaq:RNWK).

Increasing adoption of multicasting standards is just one step towards a world where users can easily watch television-quality video generated anywhere, a dream that previous interactive-TV technologies have so far failed to realize.

There remain some hurdles before you can expect to catch the latest Schwartzenegger flick on your PC, however. For one thing, right now the broadcaster and the user must be on the same Internet backbone for the system to work.

Not for everyone
New protocols must be adopted to fix that situation, but for Sunday's performance Broadcast.com will be sending video streams to several backbones, including Sprint and UUNET.

And then there's the user's Net connection speed. If you're on a 56K modem you won't find any Internet video experience very satisfying, no matter how high-quality the multicast file might be.

At present, only users of such cable-modem networks as @Home (Nasdaq:ATHM), satellite systems such as DirecPC or high-end connections such as T1 lines can view broadcast-quality files in real time.

"There's a bandwidth limitation for users, but without multicasting, you're not even fully utilizing that modem connection," Hall said.





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