DEVELOPMENTS

IN INTERNET TECHNOLOGY

This was one of the best-attended talks organised by AMPS, given by Sarah Harries (at that time representing Framfab UK) on 22nd November in De Lane Lea’s Dean Street preview theatre. We are grateful to them and engineer Gerry Teague for their support. It is impossible to give an adequate report here because it was a PowerPoint presentation, liberally illustrated with ‘slides’ and websites, though the latter were slow because a high-speed line was unavailable. However, a few printed handouts are still available to Members who wish to order a taped copy of the 2-hour evening from Bob Allen. 

Sarah said that CONVERGENCE was driven by the theories that: 1/ everything that can be connected will be; 2/ anything that can be digitised will be; 3/ everything that can be mobile-enabled will be. Two important factors were deregulation and fierce competition. One of her associate companies provides broadband internet access to homes, using Ethernet cabling, allowing TV, stereo, security system and computer all to share the same network and have connectivity to the outside world, without bandwidth restrictions. 

An example of a subject vital to the film and TV industries was RIGHTS MANAGEMENT: who owns a film, where has it been shown, to how many, who shares the revenues? This is currently discouraging owners of film rights from releasing their valuable assets onto the net, but systems are in development to address this issue. In the coming year, new alliances would be formed in the various areas of IT and telecoms services (e.g. CL, IBM, BT, Orange, AOL), media owners (e.g. Vivendi, Warners, EMAP), broadcasters (BBC, ITV, NTL, BSkyB) and emerging players (Gameplay, Two-Way TV, AOL). 

Many countries, including the US look on the UK as a test-bed for the launching of new technologies. For instance, many are interested to see what the uptake will be by the public for ADSL, the technology that converts phone lines to allow faster 512k connection to the Internet. 512k is not the maximum achievable in fact, but to keep infrastructure and the cost per subscriber down BT are intending to share this bandwidth between households at times, so achievable speeds will still vary according to how many neighbours are online simultaneously. 

With digital TV, the Government’s stated intention to switch off analogue TV transmission in 2006(?) should drive consumers to upgrade their TV sets and hence increase the number of households capable of receiving interactive TV services. 

The potential of interactive TV for commercial exploitation by retailers and advertisers has already attracted huge investment but as yet very few success stories exist as the audiences are still so small. Some think that TV viewing will remain passive and relaxing and that viewers will never truly ‘interact’. 

Mobile phones and mobile internet devices are developing fast. WAP phones (which can display basic versions of internet sites) are already here but slow and crude. GPRS is the next step which will allow faster connections and hence better quality displays. After this will come ‘3G’, the slang term for 3rd-generation mobile networks using the UMTS spectrum). This will offer mobile phone subscribers the potential of 2MB/s connection speeds to webbased services allowing the to-ing and fro-ing of ‘rich media’ such as video and music files. 

The Virage-Ingest system, now being used by the British Pathè newsreel library, logs a freeze-frame each time there’s a scene-change in a reel: these form the backbone of a database that can be published, searched and previewed on the Net. Clips can be displayed in ‘streamed video’ format. 

Bluetooth is a short-distance radio connection that doesn’t depend on line-of-sight; for example it will ‘connect’ your mobile phone to your laptop so you can check your e-mail on the train (while the phone is in your pocket!). It could even zap a pre-bought film being received by your mobile onto a special screen; the Japanese are already testing these in bars. Streaming is a method of compressing and encoding video and audio data so it can be chopped into small packets and sent over the internet at variable rates, but played out at constant speed. Each frame is discarded once viewed, meaning no full download is necessary prior to viewing. 

There are several makes of such devices, e.g. Real Player, MS Media Player and Apple Quicktime; none are very good because insufficient bandwidth is available, and the level of compression necessary omits a lot of picture detail. If you intend to put video on your own site, encode it for the player your audience is most likely to have; a lot of costly storage space and software licences would be needed if you were to offer video streams suitable for all types of player at all modem speeds. (The cheapest option is Windows Media player, as there is no licence fee for the website owner and no charge for the player for viewers/users.) 

Many other subjects were fluently touched on by Sarah, and the evening ended with a Q & A session. We all left rather awed by the huge horizons opening ahead of us. 

PETER MUSGRAVE

NB: Sarah now works at ICL, where she consults on emerging technologies. Her email address is: sarah.harries@icl.com