By Ronni Rhodes

It's on its' way...maybe not at the speed of a silver bullet, but it IS coming. Convergence. It's approaching us from our offices, our living rooms, and our telephones.

What is digital convergence? Simply put, it is the merging of audio, video, and data into a single source that can be delivered by one device to another. One of the first examples of this was the debut of television way back in 1939 when people were awed by the ability to take the magic of radio and actually add "pictures."

The popularity of television encouraged an experiment with convergence in the early 1970's in Columbus, Ohio. There, Warner Amex introduced an interactive television service named QUBE. It was a very costly failure. People were just not ready to "talk back" to the folks behind the broadcast. The success of the VCR, a passive machine, reinforced that belief.

By the late 1980's, the rapid adoption of communication devices such as the pager, fax machine, and cell phone made us far more willing to interact with devices in general. As we embraced e-mail and discovered what the Web, and the Internet, had to offer, these devices started to take on one or more functions of the others. Faxes could be sent via the computer, radio could be heard over the Internet, and wireless phones could be used to receive text data. People realized that interacting with content could be convenient as well as entertaining. The Internet was training us.

As we enter the digital age with new set top TV boxes, personal video recorders, and an often bewildering variety of things that "compute," streaming media is poised to become a prominent and dominant digital convergence technology. Its' flexibility, high quality audio, and near-VHS video quality makes it an ideal delivery system for a variety of applications. The unique ability of the PC and its' permutations to produce and receive media streams over the Internet has spawned a whole new entertainment industry.

Content is being created that has no other venue than the Internet. Small, niche oriented radio stations are appearing on a daily basis. Companies such as Atomfilms are distributing the works of independent filmmakers that might never have had the chance to be seen by a mainstream audience. Movie trailers are being streamed as "advertainments" to encourage moviegoers. Live webcams provide some of the Internet's most popular entertainment.

Mainstream television broadcasters, slow to adopt the Internet, have finally taken to the Web with a vengeance. Using a blizzard of cross-promotional strategies to entice us, we can watch the evening news on the station of our choice and then click to the web site for "in depth" coverage of those same topics. There we'll often find streamed video clips and audio only interviews that didn't "fit" the rigid broadcasting timeframe.

Live, streamed events, such as the fashion show from "Victoria's Secret" and the Madonna concert, are specifically being created for the Internet audience. The size and scope of this audience has been surprisingly large and has given impetus to broadband providers to speed up the availability and reliability of consumer broadband connections. The lack of widespread broadband access is the single greatest roadblock to the growth of the streaming video industry.

Another looming issue for streamers as we inch toward convergence is the lack of software standardization among the "Big Three" streaming software giants Real Networks, Microsoft, and Quicktime. In order to attract and keep a mainstream consumer audience, these three will have to relinquish proprietary codecs so that products can work together in a convergent fashion.

When the broadband and standards issues are resolved, it's highly likely that the streams viewed on the PC will have the quality of television signals. Video on demand and live streamed events will become everyday realities. Then the issue of the PC's reliability will be tantamount. Televisions don't need to be "rebooted," while even the best PC's still do.

As we pile up all our smart devices onto the top of the television and fill our pockets and purses with communication tools, the question of how we'll interconnect all these things goes begging for an answer. Some might conclude that we're headed for a consumer nightmare. What we need to remember, however, is that the introduction of the PC itself and the Internet were rife with competing hardware and standards. That didn't stop either one from becoming amazingly popular and successful.

Digital convergence will, in all likelihood, happen gradually and without too much fanfare. It's already begun with a mix of individual devices, some of which are connected by "wire" to the Internet but not to each other. These individual components will start to take on one another's characteristics as time goes on, and solutions will appear to network them together. New devices will appear that have multiple functions and are simpler to use. Consumers will demand economies of scale and even more intelligent devices will emerge.

No one really knows where digital convergence will take us or what it will look like in its' "final" form. We do know that the marketplace will dictate some of our choices especially those relating to distribution and content. The offerings that will succeed might be very different than the ones we envision today, but we can be certain that convenience, entertainment, and information sharing will be outstanding reasons for adopting digital convergence by both businesses and consumers.




Ronni Rhodes is the owner of WBC Imaging, an Internet company that specializes in web site enhancement utilizing streaming media technology. With her husband, Don, a broadcast engineer, they work with companies to incorporate streaming as part of successful and meaningful sales and marketing programs.

Please direct all questions and comments to:
ronni
520-742-5780

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