SEATTLE — When Progressive Networks Chief Executive Rob Glaser mounts the stage in New York today to show off the company's new RealVideo software for watching video over the World Wide Web, he hopes to spark the same kind of transformation on the Internet that his company did two years ago with its RealAudio software for sound and music.
"The Internet audio market took off because [Real Audio] works and there was great content," says Glaser. "Our goal is to start that same process with video."
Industry executives and analysts say Progressive, based here, is in a good position to shake up a market that's already crowded with incompatible video systems, and possibly even establish a standard.
"Progressive Networks will crystallize the market," says Jeff Day, executive producer of sports at ESPNet-SportsZone. "We want to deliver quality information and entertainment, but we can only do it if our customers have the [software]. Progressive will be able to create the excitement."
But with competitors already offering similar-quality products, and with many technical obstacles standing in the way of quality video transmission over the Internet, it's far from clear that Progressive can succeed in making video anywhere near as ubiquitous as audio.
Indeed, getting video to work well over the World Wide Web has been the Holy Grail of the cyber community ever since television and cable companies tabled their ambitious plans for offering interactive TV several years ago.
To be sent over the Net, video has to be converted to digital signals and then compressed into packets that can be sent through the often narrow, labyrinthine pathways of the Web. To avoid the lengthy wait required to get the video into a computer file, the packets must then be reconverted instantly by the user's computer into a moving image.
With today's top PC modems, computers and video software, you get, at best, a fuzzy, jerky picture. At worst, the picture freezes or the system crashes. While audio on the Net is already approaching radio quality after just two years on the market, most experts say it will be years before consumers will see anything on the Net that approaches TV quality.
And the heavy requirements of carrying video data to millions of users could quickly clog up an Internet infrastructure that is already dangerously bogged down.
