They have just released a beta of their WebTheater. Anind, Gregory
and I were watching videos on a PC in the GVU lab and while it was
not TV-broadcast quality it was still *VERY* good (>15 fps) with
better-than-real-audio quality audio...
If you've played around with SUN's video cameras and their proprietary
compression schemes, you have an idea of the quality- It comes in two
sizes 320x200 or 160x100...
Now, you're thinking, yeah, but what's it like on a 28.8 modem?
EXACTLY THE SAME!!!!
"Completely Amazing" does not begin to describe the experience of seeing
a lecture at Stanford (> 15 fps, in color) with audio and WWW pages
that change slides based on what the instructor is doing --- all from
home on a 28.8 line.
(although the actual lecture itself is somewhat less than amazing)
Further details include-
* live video serving, saving to a disk for on-demand video at
the same time
* dynamically adjusting bandwidth requirments
* no greater than 56K bandwidth consumed
* ability to embed into HTML or Applets, complete with API
The only catch for now is that it's only running on Win95 machines
(or NT) with MAC and Solaris coming very soon. The actual server
though runs on NT, Solaris, and a few other Unix boxes.
In fact, I'm watching the Discovery channel as I write this, all
over 28.8. Cool.
Jason