Multimedia: A Long Wait For The Picture To Change

Multimedia. It seems the Web's obvious next step: presentations which integrates animation, sound and video, which leaves behind the Web's humble text-based beginnings forever. With our Web browsers sitting on ever more powerful computers, a multimedia Web must be just around the corner. Right?

Wrong. The reality - today, this year, and probably up to the end of the century - is that the Web remains stubbornly free of multimedia. If you're anything like the typical Web user, you haven't watched too many Web-based videos recently, and you're not about to do so.

Our expectations have outstripped reality in part because we think of the Web as part of our computers. It isn't. Our computers become ever more powerful because they follow Moore's Law, the predictable doubling of processor power which occurs every two years. They process data at 100 million cycles a second or more. But see that telephone line trailing out the back of your modem just a few inches from the computer's motherboard? It takes information to that astonishingly powerful processor at a maximum rate of no more than 50,000 bits a second. And on that little wire, Moore's Law can exert no influence at all.

That tiny pipe can squeeze through text tolerably quickly. It will even cope with images, especially small ones. But try to make it deliver animations, sounds and movies and it will move at snail's pace. And the click-happy Web audience won't wait; viewers will simply move on.

Just to make things worse, the Web lacks agreed standards for multimedia. HyperText Mark-up Language (HTML), the standard language of the Web, has allowed the creation of today's feature-rich Web sites, with their strong visuals and database-driven back ends. But when it comes to multimedia, standard has broken down, in large part because browser giant Netscape has promoted rules not endorsed by the governing World Wide Web Consortium. Just to play a simple sound file without generating error messages is a surprisingly difficult task for the Web designer. Multimedia increases the chances that you'll have to maintain different site versions for different browsers; the Hotwired site, for instance, now supports half a dozen browser types. And worst of all, much multimedia is delivered through browser plug-ins - which, as this column has noted before, most viewers just won't install.

So for the moment, Web multimedia is just about more trouble than it's worth. When the Seybold Report on Internet Publishing visited one Web site builders's conference earlier this year, its correspondent found a string of Web developers actually ditching multimedia content to make pages load faster for visitors.

Quit screwing around

At Forrester Research, a firm which prides itself on detecting the Web's emerging trends, patience with the multimedia dream has clearly run out. Ask Forrester group director John McCarthy to name the Web designer's biggest waste of time right now, and he leaves no room for doubt. "Screwing around with video," he says emphatically. He's seen too many unconvincing, jerky picture-shows from too many people vainly promoting a TV-like Web, and he's sick of it.

"You go to see these guys, they show it to you on their own internal networks and it still looks like shit", he says heatedly. "Everyone's expectations have been conditioned by TV, by pictures that come at you at 32 frames per second on an 18 inch monitor. And here you are with three frames per second in this tiny little window."

McCarthy and his Forrester colleagues expressed their frustration with Web multimedia in a report called "Multimedia Realities", making it clear that that technology wasn't going to speed up multimedia downloads any time soon.

The Forrester team found site-makers still making more multimedia, mostly because they hoped it would create a "compelling'" experience for visitors. But as the team noted, worries about bandwidth were keeping most site-builders from going too far - and no wonder, since visitors keep naming the Web's slowness as their greatest dislike. The site-makers also disliked the hard, tedious work of creating the content, especially when browser and plug-in problems meant many of its intended audience wouldn't see it properly anyway.

In the short term, that meant GIF animations, supported by almost all browsers, were actually growing in popularity among Forrester's site-builders faster than any other type of multimedia presentation. On Forrester's numbers, GIF animations are closing in on Macromedia Shockwave as the most popular multimedia site enhancement, and growing notably faster than trendy but overhyped Java.

Forrester's recommendation: for at least the next two years, site-builders should use animation and audio - not jerky little movies.

Eventually, but not yet

Only around 1999 will Web multimedia really become widespread. By then, Forrester estimates, faster 56k modems will be the only ones in the shops. The world will also have a million cable modems - although Australia, with Telstra keeping cable Internet prices high and optus struggling to even compete, will have a disappointingly small slice of those.

Meanwhile, by 1999 version 4.0 Netscape and Microsoft browsers will spread to 12 million or more Web users. They and their successors (version 6.0 browsers should appear in 1999) will make viewing multimedia much less complicated; they'll also run multimedia Java applets much faster. And with these browsers widespread, site-builders will begin to turn in lage numbers to Dynamic HTML, an extremely promising built-in browser feature which will allow simple multimedia features such as layered graphics and buttons that make a noise when you click them.

To Web site builders, dreaming their multimedia dreams, that eighteen months represents a long wait before the picture changes.

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