In first two articles on streaming media, I discussed audio, maturest streaming technology, and streaming pictures, which marries photos and graphics with an audio presentation. (If you missed these two installments, please go to http://www.wbcimaging.com/articles/audio_article.htm). I'd now like to tell you about streaming video, hottest and most exciting media development on web today!

Just as television progressed from black and white, sometimes snowy, broadcasts of 1940's and 50's to elaborate home theatre systems of today, streaming video is making transition from tiny, blurry pictures to 1/4 screen color presentations with near CD quality sound. And with surprisingly good quality over 28.8 connections that most web visitors experience today! I credit this breakthrough to RealNetworks, creators of RealVideo, which is currently most popular streaming video format in use. (Others about which you might have heard or read are Vivo and Microsoft NetShow.) At end of first quarter of 1999, RealNetworks reported that over 45 million of their FREE players had been downloaded; this number is growing by 15,000 per day!

An online streaming video presentation is another marketing tool that is now affordable and extremely effective. Streaming video adds far more than just a personal touch to your web site; it actually sets you miles apart from your competition. As with streaming audio or pictures, a video presentation guarantees that at least 86% of your visitors will stay to listen or to watch. Statistics have shown that over 90% of white collar workers have a PC on their desks, but only 9% have access to television in workplace. That means that you can reach more white-collar office workers during normal office hours than all of network and cable stations combined.

Streaming video enables you to combine best attributes of web-based media with compelling nature of broadcast media. On-line advertisers are realizing significantly higher click-through rates with adoption of streaming media technology. Recent studies have found that streaming media advertising substantially increases brand recall, brand awareness, and positive brand perception. This really gives you opportunity to deliver a powerful message about your products or services - much like having your own, personal "infomercial. " Unlike a television infomercial, however, yours is available for one fixed price and it runs 365/24/7... thanks to Internet.

Now there are hundreds of image formats, although only a handful are actually appropriate for internet. And to make things even more confusing, there are additional ways to display pictures including Java, ActiveX, Dynamic HTML and so on (although these tend to just display variations on standard web graphics formats).

And if that wasn't bad enough, email and newsgroups never evolved a real, built-in standard for images. These two formats are text based and have remained so in spite of changes in browsers and technology. Special encoding technology has been created to allow attachments to be sent with messages. Most of modern email clients detect this and perform conversion automatically.

For web, dominant formats are GIF and JPEG. BMP (bit mask images) are occasionally used, and up-and-coming PNG format seems poised to threaten GIF in a few years. The GIF format is perhaps oldest and most powerful of formats (except for limitation of 256 colors), since it supports animation, interlacing and transparency. The other dominant format, JPG, tends to create smaller, albeit fuzzier images.

The three major web formats for graphics are described briefly below.

GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) - This is probably most widely used format on internet. It was created by CompuServe in 1987 to display images on their service. Some of great features of this graphics format include:

- Excellent compression - images created in GIF format can be optimized to very small sizes.

- Interlacing - Allows images to "fade" in slowly. This is very useful for large images.