Moses for the Web

Moses for the Web
As a kid growing up in Michigan, I used to hate it when we would discover a cool lake only to find it marked "private." It didn't seem right, especially on a hot summer day, that somebody could put a fence around a beach. As an adult living on Long Island, I am grateful to Robert Moses for keeping the wide swath of the South Shore open for everyone to share.

The Internet needs its own Robert Moses. For several years, Microsoft and Real Networks have been trying to erect fences around Internet audio and video content with their respective proprietary technologies. Granted, scrappy competition may help ensure consumer access to the fastest, highest-quality codecs and players. But Web users shouldn't have to get a Windows or Real software license to get at a digital copy of a song or, someday, a movie.

The competition is not in the best interests of OEMs either. The makers of set-top boxes, Internet audio players and Web appliances have limited budgets for hard disks and DRAMs. They don't want to bulk up on PC-like hardware to support multiple competing players, and I submit that consumers want options beyond a desktop computer for accessing Web multimedia.

We need a good standard-and we have one. MPEG-4 is an open, flexible technology well-suited for streaming media. It also sports built-in hooks for all the digital rights management these files need to make sure content owners can get paid for their music and video. An emerging cousin, MPEG-21, will provide all the bells and whistles studios and other content owners need to get that job done.

An ad hoc industry group, the Internet Streaming Media Alliance ( www.isma.tv/index.html), came together late last year to pursue that agenda. Backers include Apple, Analog Devices, Cisco, Philips, SGI, Sun and a couple of dozen smaller companies.

It's a start. But Microsoft and Real are already a long way down the road to capturing the hearts and minds of content creators, OEMs and consumers who think they have no choice but to embrace the two rivals' technologies. If we are going to keep the fences down, more consumers, system builders and even the regulators need to take action, and soon.