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682 WEBCASTINGthe H.320 suite of audio/video compression standards.
The ITU has also provided the standards for multipoint
document conferencing with its H.323 standards, which
standardizes conferencing over packet-switched networks
such as the Ethernet. It is also currently working on
standards for electronic program guides (EPG) that will
affect webcasting and the listing of webcast events on
the Internet and television. The T120 standard contains
a series of communication and application protocols that
provide support for real-time, multipoint data communi-
cations. Over 100 webcast and streaming media suppliers
such as Microsoft and Cisco Systems have already com-
mitted to implementing T120-based products.World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
Standards
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an interna-
tional industry consortium founded in 1994 to develop
common protocols for the Web’s evolution. The consor-
tium’s current efforts on synchronized multimedia and
extensible markup language (XML) are the most signifi-
cant to the webcasting industry.
The synchronized multimedia project is to establish
standards that enable synchronization of different me-
dia (text, graphics, audio, video) so that the presentation
can be shown in a coordinated way. As a result of the
project, W3C proposed a new markup language for use on
the Web called synchronized multimedia integration lan-
guage (SMIL). This language was designed to allow the
easy mixing of simple media objects in different formats.
The coding would use simple tags to designate elements
on a Web page. It will make it easier for people to design
and add webcasting elements to their Web pages. The use
of the language will increase the accessibility of the sites
through standardization of media objects display and it
will also increase the accessibility of audio-enabled Web
sites for the visually impaired.
XML is an advancement from HTML (hypertext
markup language), which has been the basis for build-
ing Web pages. It is a much more flexible language than
HTML and allows designers to define their own cus-
tomized markup language, enabling the use of standard
generalized markup language (SGML) on the Web, which
can define, identify, and use the structure, style, and con-
tent of documents.Proprietary Protocols
Apart from the standards-setting agencies, several web-
casting protocols are proprietary to a software vendor,
but they are eventually submitted to the standards-setting
agencies for consideration to become a common standard
for the entire industry. Two such protocols are real-time
streaming protocol (RTSP) and advanced streaming for-
mat (ASF).
Real Networks, Netscape Communications, and
Columbia University developed the real-time streaming
protocol jointly. RTSP is an application-level protocol for
control over the delivery of data with real-time properties.
The protocol is designed so that delivery of both live data
feeds and stored content can be brought under the controlof the webcaster. RTSP has been submitted to the IETF for
standards consideration.
Advanced streaming format has been introduced by
Microsoft to define the storage format for streaming me-
dia. ASF is an open standard file format in which the tools,
servers, and clients of multimedia vendors store, stream,
and present multimedia content in the same file, instead of
as separate audio, text, graphic, and video files. Microsoft
has submitted ASF for standards consideration with the
ISO and IETF.STATE OF THE RADIO
WEBCASTING INDUSTRY
Radio is the most common form of webcast tuned in by
U.S. Internet users mostly during work hours (Measure-
cast, 2002). The latest Arbitron/Edison Internet 8 study
(Rose & Rosin, 2002) shows that 25% of Americans aged
12 or above have listened to a radio station on the Inter-
net, although weekly listening was composed of only 4%
of online radio listeners. Only 45% of the online radio lis-
teners listened to local radio stations most often. The rest
most often listened to stations from other parts of (41%)
or outside the United States (9%).
The audience size of individual radio webcast is still
small. Among the top 10 radio webcasts, none of them
have a monthly cumulative measured audience (CUME)
of more than 400,000 listeners, according to Measure-
cast, Inc., the company that provides next-day audi-
ence reports for advertisers and Internet broadcasters
(http://www.measurecast.com). MusicMatch, which pro-
vides an Internet-only radio webcast, charging a subscrip-
tion of $3.33 a month, topped with a CUME radio webcast
audience of 365,783 in September 2002. Virgin Radio of
London, which has the highest CUME, only had a CUME
of 264,788 in September 2002. The U.S.-based radio sta-
tion that had the highest CUME during that same period
was WQXR-FM, a New York-based classical music sta-
tion. Its monthly CUME is only 83,550.
According to BRS Media’s study in April 2000, 9,321
radio stations had Web sites, of which 5,945 were
U.S./Canadian radio stations. The top 10 features of radio
Web sites, according to Arbitron/Edison Media Research,
are DJ info/pictures, community events, links to advertis-
ers, cool links, station information, contest entry forms,
program schedules, concert information, e-mail contact,
and station listening link (Gunzerath, 2000).
Levi’s (2000) white paper presented to the NAB ra-
dio show reported that 37% of all radio stations of-
fer streamed audio, and there are a growing number of
Internet radio stations that only operate exclusively on
the Web for Internet audiences. Because most Web radio
originates from terrestrial broadcast radio stations, the
resulting Web radio stations base much of their content
on their terrestrial broadcast radio station counterparts.STATE OF THE TELEVISION
WEBCASTING INDUSTRY
Compared to the radio webcasting industry, the TV we-
bcasting industry received much less attention from the