LAS VEGAS--Memo from tech and Web companies to traditional broadcasters: Get on the Net now, or get left in the dust.
That was the message delivered Wednesday by a panel of webcasting heavyweights to several hundred TV and radio types at the National Association of Broadcasters conference.
The conference is the industry's biggest annual event, drawing more than 100,000 people this year.
"The future of Net broadcasting," declared Rob Glaser, head of webcasting giant RealNetworks, "is the future of broadcasting."
"A few years ago, newspapers were also debating whether or not to have a presence on the Web," said Anthony Bay, general manager of Microsoft's streaming media division. "The question is not if, but when you'll do it. The market is here, the technology is here. If you wait a couple of years to get involved, it will really be challenging."
The business of transmitting video and audio over the Net is still small, but growing wildly, despite enduring stumbling blocks. According to Glaser, 15.5 million users are already tuning in some 300,000 hours of new programming every week. Annual revenues for the streaming video industry have shot up to around $200 million -- but that's still just a sliver of the nearly $120 billion-a-year broadcasting market.
Music will be the first big hit in the webcasting business, Glaser predicts, given how much easier it is to download than video, and the fact that consumers are used to digitized music on CDs. Already, he said, 400,000 songs in MP3 format are being downloaded every day.
Webcasting's potential to expand broadcasters' reach is enormous, said Mark Cuban, who recently sold his company, Broadcast.com, to Yahoo for about US $5.6 billion. According to Broadcast.com's research, 9 percent of white-collar workers have TVs at their desks; 32 percent have radios; but 95 percent have Net-connected computers.
"When your customers are at work, you're on the dark side of the moon to them," said Cuban. "You can maintain a relationship with them at a minimal cost" by beaming programs to them over the Web, he said.
But even supporters admit that there are still plenty of problems with webcasting. Audio-visual quality is generally low. Many computers lack the hardware and software to play music or video clips. And no one is entirely sure how to make money off it.
But those obstacles are shrinking, insisted Bay. Already, he claimed, 70 million people have computers with the required audio/video players. Technological improvements mean that it is now possible to get FM stereo quality sound over a dialup modem, although video quality still lags. There are also several promising business models, from direct-ordering of advertised products to pay-per-view systems.
In a similar vein, John Gage, chief researcher with Sun Microsystems, warned a luncheon crowd of several hundred not to repeat the music industry's mistake. "The record industry was sleeping, and meanwhile every teenager found out about MP3," said Gage.
As digital technology makes broadcasting ever cheaper, "the barriers to participation have fallen," said Gage. To illustrate the point, he pulled up the Ultimate Taxi Web page on the room's video monitors. It's the product of a guy in Aspen, Colorado who puts live video of celebrities who get in his cab up on the Net.
"That's your competition," said Gage.
Many television broadcasters have been surprisingly slow to get online. "It's still the old white guys talking to each other," said journalist Dyann Espinoza. "A lot of them are resistant to new technology."
"I don't even own a cell phone," confessed Kerry Maki, chief engineer at WMSN TV in Madison, Wisconsin. "This stuff is totally new to me."
