Over million viewers tuned in to the latest Victoria's Secret fashion show webcast -- but will Web viewers show up in droves to watch anything other than supermodels in their underwear?
For years tech industry experts have predicted the convergence of computers and TV but nearly every experiment in Web broadcasting drew anemic ratings. The failures were blamed on everything from a lack of advertising to tricky technology snafus.
But with video delivery systems improving by leaps and bounds and the exponential growth of broadband access, Net broadcasters are hoping the medium is about to explode.
One industry insider who's watching with intense interest is Scott Zakarin, who created The Spot in 1995. The episodic Web series drew 20,000 viewers a day, a truly impressive audience during the Web's infancy and a feat that's not yet been matched by Web broadcasters. He said he thinks technology held back both The Spot and later attempt Grape Jam.
"We were doing video in a 28.8 (bps) universe," Zakarin said. "We were doing some really cool things and our audience was really engaged -- but it's hard to keep an audience when half of them either can't log on at all or can't get the video to stream smoothly."
Indeed, blurry, choppy video feeds were generally the only game in town before broadband became a reality. But with more and more Net users connecting over high-speed networks and using vastly improved tools to access video feeds the medium is quickly getting up to speed. Zakarin is planning to launch a new online show under his Creative Light Enterprises brand in the next year.
"Video is just far more reliable now," he said. "If I'm trying to get RealVideo I can actually connect with the server and get a reliable feed that's of good quality. A couple of years ago that just didn't happen."
Viewers who couldn't get reliable feeds were a lot more likely to give up and turn back to television. But those who use high-speed networks are now looking around for entertainment online. Jim Safran, CEO of LikeTelevision said that new broadband users are often disappointed by the small amount of webcasts and video they find online.
"They have this brand new broadband connection and want to put their new toy through its paces," he said. "But besides us and a few sites that include video content as a sideline they may not find the amount of entertainment they expect."
LiveTelevision currently offers 350 hours of broadband-enabled television shows, live event webcasts, and films. Broadcast.com offers a small roster of on-demand films and webcasts from such stations as CourtTV and Tribune Media's American Independent Network along with hundreds of Net radio signals.
Both Broadcast.com and LikeTelevision also supplement their coffers by offering video-on-demand services for corporations, a lucrative sideline for Web broadcasters who are still short on advertisers willing to take a leap of faith into an unproven industry.
"The medium just hasn't been adopted on a mass level," said Zakarin. "Web broadcasts are usually just gimmicky stunts, not true attempts to get a mass audience."
While some of the "stunts" (like the Victoria's Secret fashion-show webcasts) have indeed drawn a good-sized audience, more concerted efforts to woo regular viewers have often failed -- witness the recent bankruptcy of former Net broadcaster DEN.
The fact that DEN failed at the Herculean task of creating a successful NetTV station in a fledgling medium surprised few in the industry, who see more immediate opportunities in repurposing content created for other mediums like television or film.
Tim Sanders, director of the Yahoo Value Lab think tank, points to the Victoria's Secret show as a prime example of successful content repurposing.
"Victoria's Secret had been putting on this fashion show for five years but it was only a live event," Sanders said. "So maybe 1,000 people would see what it cost millions to create. When you put the event on the Web they spent a fraction of what they'd spend to broadcast on television yet millions of people were able to tune in."
Sanders and other Web broadcasters believe there's major opportunity in repurposing content. Broadcasters like Yahoo's Broadcast.com and LikeTelevision are concentrating almost solely on streaming TV shows and films to viewers instead of attempting to create original content.
And though major TV networks like ABC or CBS haven't yet started streaming signals for Net broadcasts, the success of digital signals broadcast online by affiliate stations may make them take notice.
Human Code, an Austin, Texas, digital content studio that develops new media for clients in entertainment, learning, and business markets, started streaming nightly news broadcasts from local CBS affiliate K-EYE in 1998.
At first the Net signal was "pretty much just an interesting experiment," according to vice president of strategic partnership Mellie Price.
The response to that experiment made the company sit up and take notice.
"We got a lot of mail," said Price. "People who had moved out of town were tuning in to keep in touch with their hometown. Soldiers fighting in the Gulf War were tuning in. We had no idea so many people were even interested in a news webcast, much less that they'd watch consistently."
Human Code continues to broadcast K-EYE but like most Net broadcasters won't release information on ratings, which have not yet reached impressive levels. Similarly, PC Data Online wouldn't release actual ratings for Web broadcasters, citing the company policy that bars the release ratings that chart below 1 percent of the Web audience.
For now, more traditional sites like ESPN or MTV.com pull in far more viewers than sites like Broadcast.com, and many more viewers tune in to Web radio than Net video broadcasts. But execs like Sanders and Safran are hungry for the enormous ratings generated by TV and hope the success of bandwidth-heavy Atom Films -- which pulled in 882,000 unique users last month according to PC Data Online -- is a harbinger for the future of webcasting.
"We're only in the first inning of a nine-inning game," Sanders says. "But it looks like it's going to be a high-scoring game."
