Dreaming of Web streaming? Broadcast.com explains how to get your program on the Net.

If, like many others in the entertainment field, you're wondering what impact the Internet is going to have on television down the line, you may have thought of putting some of your programs on the Web, just to test the waters... and hedge your bets, in case the computer happens to triumph over the TV set, becoming the entertainment medium of the future.

What exactly is involved in turning your TV-friendly fare into ones and zeros, and how do you get people on the Web to watch it? One person who is uniquely qualified to address these questions is Mark Cuban, president and co-founder of broadcast.com, the company at the forefront of online broadcasting. (Broadcast.com won't be alone on that front for long, with companies like RealNetworks, InterVU, Disney and NBC entering or looking to enter the promising young field of Webcasting.) The broadcast.com Web site offers more than 50,000 hours of on-demand video and audio programs as well as daily Webcasts of 30 TV and cable stations and 370 radio stations. Since its launch in 1995, broadcast.com has Webcast more than 16,000 live events.

These diverse Web programs didn't all land on the broadcast.com site as a result of one simple process. There are a variety of questions that must be answered before you can go about turning your entertainment fare into Web fodder. "There's no one hard, fast rule for Webcasting," Cuban explained. "You really have to work backwards from your goal."

First of all, do you want to do a live Webcast, or do you want to make pre-existing programs available to Internet users on demand? "If you're doing something live, it's very similar to TV," Cuban said. "You have to have the production crew, and you have to have the ability to get it from your location to the rest of the world. And we'll assist you in doing all of that on a turnkey basis." Broadcast.com will send a camera crew to record the program, which will be digitized and transmitted to the company's data center in Dallas, Texas. The program can be sent to the data center via a satellite uplink, or, if it's an audio-only program, it can be sent over the Internet on an ISDN line. The data center has more than 700 servers, which store terabytes (that's right, trillions of bytes) of video and audio. The large bandwidth provided by all these servers makes it possible for lots of Web surfers to access the same program at the same time. The program can be made available on broadcast.com's Web site or on any other Web site you choose. In the final step, the Web user clicks on the title of the program, which is then drawn from a video server, sent out over the Internet and viewed on the user's computer.

The process for turning a preexisting show into an on-demand Web program is only slightly different. Cuban explained that broadcast.com takes the final program, in whatever format it's in (VHS, Beta, etc.), digitizes it and puts it on the servers at the data center. From there, the process is identical to that for a live event.

The choices you make about the image quality and promotion methods for your Web program depend on what your goals are. It's the same as TV, according to Cuban: "Some things you want to get on a major network, some things you want on a specialty cable channel and some things are just a labor of love and you just want it on cable access."

Clients with a Web program can promote the show themselves, or they can rely on broadcast.com to help them reach either a specific audience or the largest possible audience. Cuban noted that if a program is on the broadcast.com site, it is automatically exposed to the more than 520,000 people who visit the site each day and the four million to five million who visit it each month, "looking for things to watch and listen to." Methods of increasing traffic to a particular program may include promotion on other sites that broadcast.com has partnerships with (e.g., Yahoo!).

Another question to consider is what Cuban terms "production values." These depend on what audience you're trying to reach. "I can deliver it so that someone with a 28.8 kbps modem can watch, and it will be at one level of quality," he explained, "or I can make the choice to deliver it so that ... a 56K modem user or maybe a cable modem user or a corporate user who's got a T1 line can watch." Cuban noted that, while the Webcasts geared to 28.8 kbps modems will be somewhat "herky-jerky," the format is ideal for music programs or for video programming that consists mostly of talking heads. "But the 300K or the cable modem [Webcast], it's going to be just like television," he explained. In fact, Cuban said, a program Webcast at such high speeds looks better than the same program on television.

When the president of the top video streaming site admits that Webcasts are often herky-jerky, you may wonder what potential Webcasting could possibly have. Cuban likes to counter this doubt with a comparison to the early days of television: "In the '50s, people were looking at a little seven-inch screen that was blurry." The poor quality of those first images didn't hamper the development of television into the huge force that it is today. In the same way, Cuban believes that advances in Internet technology will transform Webcasting: "Every single time that there's a new cable modem installed, that's a new home passed for broadcast.com and all of our content partners where we can deliver TV-quality video."

Because of the limitations of today's Webcasting, the core of broadcast.com's audience is at-work users, who are likely to have the highest-speed Internet connections. However, as Cuban noted, cable modem ventures like TCI's @Home and Time Warner's Road Runner are colonizing more and more homes.

Perhaps the most important question you may have about Webcasting is: What is putting that program on the Web going to cost me? While he stressed that each situation is unique, Cuban was able to outline some typical projects and what they might cost. At the low end would be a client who wants to put a four-hour home movie on the Internet for far-flung family members to see; the cost of placing the movie on the broadcast.com site for 30 days might be $125 per hour, or $500. A mid-range project might involve a university that already puts its distance learning programming up on a satellite; if it wants to make that programming available to Web users as well, the price might range from $2,500 to $5,000. At the high end of the scale would be a client who is planning a live Webcast from China on New Year's Eve, 1999; in order to pull out all the stops, including heavy promotion on broadcast.com, e-mails to broadcast.com users and promotion on other Web sites, the company might charge upwards of $250,000.

The last question is: Why would you want to turn your program into streaming video, when the future of the Webcasting medium is completely obscured? Well, best to think of it as an insurance policy. If Webcasting doesn't ultimately surpass television, you've plunked down some money for little more than an education into the ins and outs of technology. But if Cuban's vision prevails, you'll be invested in Webcasting from the beginning.

And that vision is a dim one for television. Right now, Cuban said, Webcasting is like cable television in its infancy: it's not necessarily available in all areas, but "as we get more roll-outs ... people are just going to expect it and want it, just like cable." He concluded, "Long term impact is, it's going to put a heap of hurt on network television."

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Global Media Corp. will be the first Canada-based company to market videos and CDs on the Internet. The plan is to set up a Web site enabling users to preview and purchase CD-quality music via Liquid Audio software, while at the same time ensuring copyright protection and tracking royalties.

Michael Metcalfe, president of Global Media, has said that this is the first time a Canadian Internet company and a Canadian distributor have been able to take advantage of the Internet market. Future plans include providing online video-download services.