LIMITATIONS OF WEBCASTING.
Despite the promise of webcasting, it is still a long way from providing the immersive audio/video experience enabled by traditional broadcast. In praticular, traditional broadcasters seeking to expand their content into the new medium need to know the limitations of webcasting, which include:
QUALITY:
The low data-transmission speeds characteristic of today's Internet impose severe limitations of the quality of the webcast experience. While a direct broadcast satellite (DBS) dish may receive data in the 2Mbps range, a modem is limited to 0.05Mbps. These speeds may provide tolerable audio quality (comparable to FM radio), but restrict video to a mere 1.5"/2.5" screen. Video runs in the 5-15 frames per second range, and motion often contains artifacts-rendering an action scene (e.g., a basketball game) almost unrecognizable.
SMALL AUDIENCES:
Unlike radio and television, webcasts require a dynamic connection between the computer providing the content, or media server, and the end-user's equipment. This places major limitations on the mumber of users able to view a webcast. Current computer technology limits the audience to about 1,000 per webcast media server-puny by the standards of other media. While strategies that replicate content across a large number of media servers (collectively called multicast) may increase audiences, most older computers can't handle webcast data; and many webcast formats require the user to download a custom software player. These factors all conspire to restrict webcasting to narrowcast audiences of a few thousand.
MULTIPLE STANDARDS:
Webcasting is a new medium, with the resulting large number of incompatible hardware and software standards competing for dominance. Major commitments to one standard are difficult because hardware and software are in a state of rapid flux.
NO FORMULAS FOR SUCCESS:
The Internet is so different from other media that formats that work well in broadcast (e.g, sitcoms) may utterly fail to capture an audience. Webcasters planning to work in the medium must be willing to take risks to develop new and untested content forms in order to determine what will work best.