A new partnership between RealNetworks, makers of RealAudio and RealVideo streaming media players, and a bandwidth-reducing technology company aims to bring clearer sound and music to Net users.
RealNetworks (RNWK) and Inktomi (INKT) have teamed up to develop and market an Internet cache product dedicated to streaming media.
"It's a pretty easy mental leap," said Paul Gauthier, Inktomi's chief technology officer. "Streaming media is probably more amenable to caching than regular [Web] content."
Web video caching is intended to improve the accessibility of popular, on-demand media clips accessed via a Web browser. Caching stores copies of Web pages or other content on servers that are geographically close to end users. The idea is that because such cached files need not travel as far across the Net, they load faster. So, if a major news event breaks, or popular new streaming content is released, the content would download faster due to its proximity.
The as-yet-unnamed joint Inktomi and RealNetworks product will fold the streaming capabilities of RealNetworks' RealSystem G2 multimedia software into the next version of Inktomi's Traffic Server network caching software.
Under the new technology, Inktomi and RealNetworks promise media that will be delivered to customers at higher speeds and with better quality -- theoretically meaning fewer of the skips and dropouts that can plague media streams.
Internet service providers would benefit from the plan too, because caches allow more content to be accessed on an ISP's local machines, rather than off the Net at large.
While it may be an obvious step to add media to the content that can be stored on a Web cache, technologically the two companies had plenty of work to do.
Incorporating the protocols and packets of streaming media -- "that's very complicated technology," Gauthier said. "We've been working with Inktomi for some time," added Len Jordan, RealNetworks senior vice president of media systems. "We think it's a great integration.... This is a particular area [of media distribution technology] where the work was more substantial than the company could do alone."
Jordan said the need for more efficient distribution of RealNetworks media is clear. The company's format represents 90 percent of all streaming media on Web sites, and 100 Fortune 500 companies are deploying the technology. Much broadbased, popular mainstream content -- from ABC News stories to video of a live birth -- is going up on the Web as well, and pulling in large number of viewers.
"The trend is very substantial," Jordan said. "If you extrapolate the growth, it's a very significant problem [for networks] to resolve."
Known for its search engine technology that is at the core of Wired Digital's HotBot and the forthcoming Microsoft Start portal site, Inktomi is one of several companies with a renewed focus on Web caching. The company's Traffic Server product allows Internet backbone providers to set up large-scale caches to reduce network load -- by as much as 40 percent to 50 percent, the company claims.
Digital information caching has long been used in the design of computers, keeping frequently used computing instructions closer to processors that need them. The technology is also used in Web browsers like Netscape to store commonly accessed Web files (such as images) on PCs.
Web caching assumes that the model will translate to the Web. But despite the promise of the technology, some say it's not clear that Web caching can deliver the same level of efficiency amid the increasing frequency with which content changes on the Web.
But dynamic content isn't going to reduce the usefulness of cached content, Gauthier said. The bulk of pages are very static, he notes. "There's some tiny little dynamic content within very static pages," but the bulk of the delays in page-delivery comes from very heavy -- and static -- graphics.
There is also the issue that some content providers fear that cache distribution will reduce control over their own content. For example, a site that updates its files frequently might find that users are not receiving the very latest version of their pages.
Gauthier promised that with Traffic Server "the only thing they [providers] won't observe is extra load" on their servers. Feedback on all user interaction with media -- such as playback, pausing, fastforwarding, and how much of a video is viewed -- is all tallied and sent back to the site providing the stream.
True, as caches get more sophisticated, they can pass more critical usage information back to providers, said Forrester Research analyst Ted Julian. "But the reality is there are still some very real hurdles that caching faces. People will demand realtime feedback as to who's seeing their content."
Until providers are assured that they are not sacrificing important page-viewing data, many of them, Julian said, are likely to use markup instructions on their pages to keep their contents from being cached.
