The Net, It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like TV

by Jim Mikles
October 2000

It is no secret that the Web is brimming with rich, compelling content custom-tailored to fit any taste. Bringing this variety to the living room, where many of us are more apt to want to sit back and enjoy it, is still a challenge. As anyone who has tried it knows, Web content often makes very poor television. In the world of television, where fast cuts, loud music, slick video and celebrity-hype are the standard fare, text-heavy design and slow-loading pages are hardly the stuff of prime-time viewing. The marriage of the variety of content on the Web with the viewing quality of television is still such an intriguing prospect, however, millions believe it’s worth the effort to try.
Getting compelling Web content to the TV is a triumvirate affair. For a Web page to be appealing on TV, it would ideally offer moving pictures and sound. To do this, it needs three things. First, it must have content in a format that moves or makes noise, such as streaming video, Flash and Shockwave animation. Second, it needs a device in the home, such as a WebTV or PC/TV, capable of reading one or more of these formats and displaying their content on the TV screen. Finally, there must be enough bandwidth to deliver the content with decent quality.
This overview of the latest technology and techniques will help you view the most TV-friendly Web sites on your TV. We’ll explain the file formats to seek, the devices to use and the amounts of bandwidth required to make your TV Web-surfing the most fulfilling and entertaining.

Best Media Formats

There’s an age-old TV argument about which comes first: the content or the medium. On the Web, this distinction becomes even more blurry. Designers who make Web pages for television operate in a great unknown. Design specifications exist for the WebTV and AOL TV set-top boxes as well as for the Net4TV Web site that try to bring some order to this frontier. Their authors advocate larger fonts, less scrolling, less text and more audio, but they don’t really know what works. They do know this: TV works on TV. So if a Web page is going to work on TV, it had better act like TV.
Under this premise, some of the more robust multimedia formats seem like logical Web-for-television candidates. Streaming video, encoded in formats such as RealMedia (.rm) or Windows Media (.asf) or download-and-play formats such as QuickTime (.mov) or MPEG, are the closest thing to television as we know it. They are video formats. They deliver moving pictures and sound to "players" capable of reading them. Until recently, however, WebTV-type set top boxes have been incapable of playing these files. Only PC/TV users could enjoy them on a TV set. Even for them, the video would be small and jerky, because better quality video would demand higher speed Internet connections than they had in their homes.
Although standard streaming video might be too small and jerky for an evening together on the couch, slide shows that are made for streaming offer a more enjoyable alternative. Whether authored using RealMedia’s Real SlideShow software or other editing tools, streaming slide shows present still pictures and synchronized sound like good old-fashioned slide shows. Since the pace of frame changes is so slow, the quality of the frames remains high. Instead of delivering crummy pictures that move, the streaming formats can deliver decent pictures that stay still for a few seconds each. A streaming slide show is not MTV, but it’s not nearly so annoying as streaming video over a slow connection. Try some on your TV if you have a device (PC/TV or WebTV Plus) that supports streaming.
Animation formats, on the other hand, have come far on the Web. These deliver good quality moving pictures and sound without streaming video’s great demand for bandwidth. Shockwave is one of the most powerful Web animation formats. It consumes less bandwidth than streaming video, it can be used to generate interactive content, such as video-type games, and it has the feel of a "real" program, without jerks or pixelization. Regrettably, the current generation of Web-for-TV set top boxes does not support Shockwave animations. Only the PC/TV user gets to enjoy Shockwave animations on TV.
The Flash animation format, from Macromedia, the same company that makes Shockwave, is less robust in that it’s not so interactive. What’s nice about Flash is that it’s very passable as a viewing format for TV sets. Flash animation is clean and quick. It has got low overhead, so it’s supported by a variety of devices. Flash programs are among best content available on the Web for viewing on television. Finally, WebTV Plus devices do support Flash, so they can be enjoyed on the TV sets of many more viewers. Flash is an excellent media type to search for when you are surfing the Web from a TV.
Other multimedia formats to be aware of include QuickTime and MPEG-1. QuickTime delivers great video quality, but QuickTime clips sometimes take up a lot of space as they are often designed for broadband Internet connections. MPEG-1, which requires the user to download an entire file to the local hard drive before playing, is one of the original Internet video formats. With high speed Internet connections, however, download can be a breeze and the playback has very good quality. MPEG-2 clips, typically, are encoded at far higher quality than their MPEG-1 brethren, but, as a result, they tend to be much larger, taking much longer to download. MPEG-4 is a newcomer to the MPEG format family that promises higher-than-MPEG-1-quality at smaller than MPEG-2 file sizes. Again, these formats are currently for the PC/TV user only.
Streaming video, Shockwave, Flash, QuickTime and MPEG all deliver TV-friendly content across the Internet. It is now possible to play Flash and some streaming files on some WebTV Plus boxes. To see the others on TV, you currently need a PC/TV. If your WebTV Plus or PC/TV has a 56K or slower Internet connection, search for streaming slide shows rather than streaming video. You’ll be more pleased with the result.

Loads of Devices

For the second leg of our triumvirate, let’s look briefly at the devices that deliver the Web to the TV in relation to what media they support. The most popular device, of course, is WebTV. The WebTV Classic doesn’t support many of the multimedia formats on the Web that make it worth watching in the living room. It is useful primarily for e-mail and surfing standard Web pages. WebTV Plus is a true upgrade that supports Flash animation and now RealMedia (see review of RCA WebTV Plus on page 28).
Another way to connect the Web to your television is to connect a PC to the TV. A home-built PC/TV isn’t for everyone. There are cabling issues, keyboard issues and video hardware issues, not to mention the fact that most people use their computers for computing tasks, which they don’t typically execute from a couch. But as more and more people have spare computers lying around (not to mention high-speed Internet connections, which is an important point we’ll delve into shortly), installing a video card that supports TV-style video-out (NTSC) and obtaining a wireless keyboard might be a decent solution to bring the Web into the living room. There are also PC/TV systems built expressly for the living room such as the WebFlyer Computer Plus recently released by Eagle Wireless International (http://www.eglw.com/english/new.html). The moving media you can get on a PC/TV are more varied and currently more robust than those available on a WebTV, but the set top boxes may be catching up.
Formats for delivering moving media through the Web without demanding enormous amounts of bandwidth have multiplied. PC/TVs can handle all these formats, and set top boxes have come to embrace at least some.

The Fat Pipe

Multimedia technology, including streaming video, is advancing because of increasingly cheap and accessible high-speed Internet connections, known as "broadband." Many of the multimedia formats that make good TV are feasible only with this type of high-speed connection.
56K is about the slowest you can get away with in the living room. WebTV Plus boxes currently come with 56K modems built in. Streaming video at this speed is possible, but is an exercise in tolerance. DSL, or digital subscriber line Internet access, and cable modem access are becoming very popular very quickly. Current PC/TV owners with one of these connections can enjoy the moving media the Web holds at very good quality. Will we see WebTV Plus-type set top boxes with DSL or cable modem connections any time soon? That would take some doing technically, but stranger things have happened.
A guess: keep an eye on the DBS providers. Adding a DSL connection to a WebTV- or Ultimate TV-based satellite tuner would certainly result in a killer product. The added cost could be easier to palate for the feature-seeking satellite subscriber than for the budget-conscious WebTV user.
The cable modem might seem the most logical way to get high-speed Internet to the television. Most TVs, after all, already have a cable running into them. But despite the name, cable modems still only run on a computer platform. AT&T @Home is the largest cable modem service available in the U.S., and there is talk of making the service available to the television, providing "video on demand" along with screaming-fast TV Web surfing, but so far it’s still just talk.
There is also the potential to get high-speed Internet off of a satellite, as with the Hughes DirecPC service, but again, this is high-speed delivered to the PC, not the TV.
So basically, if you want broadband on the TV, you are looking at connecting it to the PC and then configuring a PC/TV. Conversely, if you are going to go to the trouble of connecting a PC to a TV, it makes the most sense if you have a broadband Internet connection.

Why It’s Worth It

TV-quality content delivered from the Web is still a dream for most of us. It’s possible, but the media formats and bandwidth requirements make it daunting. But let’s consider for a moment what we love about the Web. We can find content on any topic. We can communicate with practically any person who owns a computer. We can author content and have our own presence with a minimum of essential tools. For these reasons, the Web is great. The interactivity it provides makes the information and entertainment possibilities limitless.
As innovative technologies such as Web animation software, streaming video encoding and broader bandwidth proliferate, the Web is fast becoming a realistic means for distributing moving media. This is bringing the low-budget economies of Web production and distribution to a medium, video, that has long been inaccessible due to its sheer expense.
Expensive video production and distribution must be supported financially by broadcasting lowest-common-denominator programming to millions. Lower-cost production for cable channels can be supported by narrowcasting programming of limited audience appeal.
Today, the very small budget productions of Web-video and Web-animations can be supported by extremely small audiences holding extremely narrow interests. The dawn of slivercasting is upon us. The fact that new technologies are making the latter productions look and sound good on TV sets will not hurt this trend in the least.