In Apple, a lesson for streaming business

Whatever comparisons might be drawn between Netscape and RealNetworks in their struggles against Microsoft, at least one difference is clear: Unlike browsers, streaming technologies lack a standard that makes competing products work with one another.

While most Web pages can be read by any browser, multimedia audiences must download RealPlayer for RealNetworks streams, Windows Media Player for Microsoft streams and QuickTime Player for Apple streams.

"Everyone's going to pay lip service to open standards," Jupiter's McAteer said. "Microsoft, RealNetworks and Apple will adopt the format but then implement different codecs for video compression and playback."

The state of streaming is a classic scenario of what technology purists fear most: that standards will follow the market--not the other way around, as the development of the Web was initially envisioned. In theory, that should favor the current leader, RealNetworks; but with Microsoft in the ring, nothing is a sure thing.

In the browser war, the Web's lingua franca, HTML, predated the existence of pioneer Netscape Communications and its rivalry with Microsoft. Web authors' complaints about browser makers' mutually incompatible "extensions" to HTML strengthened the influence of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards organization and spurred the formation of advocacy groups like the Web Standards Project, which goads the browser providers into hewing closely to W3C recommendations.

In streaming, by contrast, technical standards came about after technologies had been accepted on the market. That, industry executives and analysts say, will make standards ultimately impotent in enforcing universally compatible building codes.

A second reason is that no single standard will ensure interoperability for all the processes involved in delivering streaming media from a server to a PC.

"There are so many levels of interoperability, and so much innovation that remains to be done in every one of those, that standardization is just not possible right now," said Gary Schare, group product manager for business solutions at Microsoft.

The current streaming standards, followed by both RealNetworks and Apple, are the Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP), standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and the Real-Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), the product of a loose consortium of Internet companies including Apple and RealNetworks, but not including Microsoft.

The trouble with those standards is that they work with only part of the delivery of streaming media: sending it from a server over the Internet to an individual's computer. That still leaves the process of compressing and decompressing the data, the container that holds the data, the metadata that describes it, and security structures that govern how it can be used.

Still, Apple says that its adherence to the standards makes QuickTime streams operable with other servers.

"QuickTime is open--meaning that you can stream QuickTime using any industry-standard RTP/RTSP server software. You don't have to buy any server software from Apple," said an Apple executive who did not want to be named. "This is simply not true with Real. While they give away a baby server that can serve a few simultaneous streams, for any serious use you must buy their server software and pay their 'server tax.'"

RealNetworks dismissed Apple's criticisms, citing its work both on RTSP and on Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL), a W3C standard for coordinating audio and video elements on Web pages, as evidence of its commitment to standards and of the difficulty of standardizing a complicated process.

"You've got a transport standard by the IETF, a layout standard by the W3C, and file formats by ISO," said Peter Zaballos, director of systems marketing for RealNetworks. "It's a highly complex system that we've been working on for years."

The file format Zaballos referred to, MPEG-4, is an audio and video compression format that has been adopted by the International Standards Organization and officially endorsed by many computer hardware and consumer electronics manufacturers.

"MPEG-4 will be pegged as the road to open standards," Jupiter's McAteer predicted. "But there's always the next thing. With limited bandwidth, there's a ton of room for continued innovation on the codecs, and that's where the technology will continue to be nonuniform and proprietary."

Other possible avenues to de facto standardization exist: cross-licensing agreements in one direction and open-source development and reverse-engineering efforts in the other.

In the end, however, the noble goal of a formal standard determined objectively by an independent body may be largely academic. As with so many things on the Internet, traditional standards processes simply cannot keep up with the explosive growth rate.

This means that the company that wins the market is likely to determine which technological formats are followed by everyone else. Although few in the streaming industry are willing to write off RealNetworks, many say Microsoft is fighting as though its life is on the line--and given its seemingly bottomless war chest, time appears to be on its side.

"It's not surprising that Microsoft is out there hoping to take that ground back. The entire computer is based on multimedia now," said Brian Kenner, of streaming services company Intervu. "RealNetworks and Apple are no different. It's just that Microsoft is better funded."  

News.com's Mike Yamamoto, Evan Hansen and Jim Hu contributed to this report.

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