President Clinton was two-stories tall on the video wall towering over the United Center crowd when he delivered his acceptance speech Thursday. But on the Internet, the president’s image took on Lilliputian stature–just 2 inches high–while he addressed the delegates and the country.
Though reduced to a postage-stamp-size image, the presidential video streaming onto personal-computer screens all over the planet via ordinary telephone lines carried huge implications. It could affect not only the future of politics but also television.
DNC 1996, the party’s first convention on the Internet, is writing political history on-line, and the changes are playing out from the convention floor’s touch-screen delegation voting terminals–each with complete Internet access and a direct link to the convention podium–to banks of computers called servers in the United Center’s basement, where they are guarded from attack by hackers.
The video that these servers turn out for the voting terminals and for computers all over the globe is tiny because the data that make up its pictures on Internet-connected computers must move over 28,800-bits-per-second copper telephone lines rather than cable TV’s 1 million-bits-per-second coaxial and fiber-optical cables. The faster the data move over transmission lines, the larger the image can be.
However, Internet television will be indistinguishable from traditional video by the time the next Democratic National Convention rolls around, said Randy Haldeman, of Palo Alto, Calif.-based VDOnet Inc., currently considered the world leader in this technology.
Next time, the nominee will be as tall on the Net as he or she is on any other TV screen. Then the world of Dan Rather, David Brinkley, Tom Brokaw and the rest will be as different from today as today is from the days when Roger Mudd and other broadcast reporters roamed among the delegates with backpacks tethered to minicams.
When reduced to Internet form, television can be archived and retrieved and searched for key elements, just as newspaper stories can be stored in a computer database and accessed with a few keystrokes. Viewers will no longer be forced to wait for the story they want to watch. “Television,” said VDOnet’s Haldeman, “will be democratized the next time a convention is held, and it will be a convention where people view their video on demand.
“They’ll watch it at the time, the place and the pace that they, and not some network scheduling department, say,” explained Haldeman, whose company’s software is used by CBS, PBS and the Democratic National Committee to broadcast Internet video.
Another leader in the technology revolution, Fredric Golman, president of River Forest-based Internet Television Network, said his company has archived 250 movies that people with Internet connections can call up at http://www.intv.net and view using VDO software.
And, Golman noted, at least one TV network already posts its own archived video on its Web site. CBS offers its video from the Republican convention, allowing anybody who drops by to review speeches by Colin Powell, George Bush and, of course, Bob Dole at http://www.cbs.com.
Television, in fact, has jumped aggressively into the Internet, perhaps as a form of bet-hedging. Though their video offerings vary widely, most networks and cable channels–and even scores of individual TV shows–maintain Web sites, containing everything from star biographies to breaking news to plot lines of series. Among the most popular are ESPN’s ESPNet and the Discovery Channel’s site.
“Maybe we’re the people who are going to replace the television networks as we now know them,” said Golman, who noted that the traditional networks already have dropped much of their interest in convention coverage.
“Maybe the next time,” he said, “they (ABC, NBC and CBS) won’t even come to the convention because they’re not needed.”
