Broadband's cutting edge

The Internet: What's next on broadband's cutting edge? FEBRUARY 2000

The internet. Dot com this and www that. Nobody is expecting this phenomenon to subside, this new form of human communication called the Internet. Yet a blitz of advertising in the conventional media is about to turn it all into a series of cliches to be discarded with contempt, or to be ignored as utterly commonplace.

What has made human beings the most powerful animals on earth is our ability to form powerful social groups, and the internet strengthens this ability, intensifies it by an order of magnitude — and speeds it up. And broadband does it all over again. Paradoxically, it may weaken our need to make commitments to each other, because communication is so highly lubricated. It changes the rules of communication in lots of ways that we're not even aware of yet. If only Aldous Huxley were alive today to warn of us it's dangers. Aside from the perils of distraction and information overload, plus the numerous battles going on between the real world and the virtual world, I want to inform you of some of it's benefits.

Before I begin, though, I have one, simple question.

Why, of all letters in the English language, did someone have to choose "www" as the prefix for all of these websites? The letter "W" is the ONLY letter in the English language that contains THREE syllables and not just one. It is the most cumbersome string of letters to pronounce, and now we're stuck with this pain-in-the-ass fixture in our syntax. I wouldn't even mind that much if there was just one other letter in the language that contained, say, two syllables. But there isn't.

This tiresome combination of letters, www, which has already forced my tongue to undulate 500,000 more times than I'd anticipated, must, sooner or later, go the way of the Dodo. Please.

But let me get back to the real purpose of today's parable.

I have enjoyed a DSL line for the last three years months, and there is, of course, no going back. This website, which used to take 40 minutes to upload, now moves to the server in seconds. And streaming media is a real phenomenon. But what is of particular interest to me now are the Macromedia products like Flash, a vector-based animation program that can be used to build websites and create animation. If you don't have DSL or a cable modem, you don't know what you're missing. The character animation that Flash produces is not exceptional, even if at the moment it's newfound simplicity in websites like Hotwired Animation is rather charming. The point is, it looks pretty good on your browser and you can interact with it.

But the explosion of graphics intensive sites (sights) produced with Flash is becoming truly mind-boggling. You can find some of the best of them at the Flash Challenge, where web surfers can rate and review their favorite sites, many of which are amazing experiences for addictive graphics junkies like you and me.

This seems like a potential "killer app", if ever there was one. It is still in it's primitive, early stages. But what this animation sorely needs is real story content, real, meaningful words and ideas to support the tricked-out images and sounds. But many of these sites are well worth the trip, if all you care about is form and not so much substance.

I want to learn Flash, not just because it's interactive or because it's streaming media, but because it makes animation part of the website in a very integrated way, unlike pure streaming media such as Real Audio or Quicktime video, which run in a detached, separate, display window. (Somebody will find a way to make streaming video more interactively integrated into websites. But when? With the internet providing the springboard for ideas, one suspects it won't be too long.)

Among the best work I've seen in Flash media is presented at a site from a San Francisco-based web development company called Cymbic. I've been told that the broadband site is a 5500K Flash movie, and the links animate when you move your mouse over them. Corporate logos morph their geometries from one to another in an impressive display of the technology.

The program is called Flash because vector-based graphics load and execute faster than raster-based video images. Unfortunately, the audio that typically (but not always) accompanies Flash movies really sucks. We're definitely talking 8-bit, and on top of that compressed, for Christ's sake. Seems streaming media on the web provides video of very mediocre quality, or audio of occasionally decent quality, but getting both is going to take some techno-leaps. I love my DSL, but I want more bandwidth, man.

And a final note on video: Charlie White, editor of Digital Video Editing, predicts that, thanks to the miracle of compression, HDTV will suddenly be transmittable over standard phone lines by this year's NAB conference. This seems like a pretty far-out prediction, considering that even ordinary NTSC video looks pretty dreadful right now on a Broadband browser. But Charlie acknowledges that it's a nutty prediction, and that everyone will be floored by this development. Hmmm.

-John C. Graves