One of things we had to come to terms with as we planned the focus of this web site was a basic question: What is digital webcasting?

The answer is not as obvious as it seems. There's video conferencing, for instance. Or streaming media. But one of the things that excites us about the term "webcasting" is the broadcasting parallel. With the webcast, we have the true personalized medium, offering a channel for absolutely everyone in the world. It's much more feasible on the Web than it was for the cable TV industry, where the term "narrowcasting" was coined. With access to the ultimate audience--the entire wired world--webcasting can take advantage of original programming, flexible starting times, extreme niches to make nearly any topic a realistic programming option.

Just think of the potential...because for the most part that's where the industry is at. That is not a putdown of the webcasting community. We're all victims of existing bandwidth limitations. We exist on a bedrock of faith, an underlying belief that the technology will to improve. After all, it always has!

The industry will explode only when wideband webcasts are delivered at the same real-time rate as broadcasts are. In the meantime, there's a lot of great stuff being webcast, and some extremely clever and innovative people behind it. They've found ways around some of the technology limitations, doing things like rolling long introductory credits and title pages while a program loads in the background.

It's hard to imagine, but one day bandwidth will be a non-issue. How will we know when that day has arrived? When we don't think about the limitations any more, and can concentrate solely on programming, content, and marketing issues. We look forward to traversing that ground together.

Frank Moldstad

Frank Moldstad has been Editor-in-Chief of numerous print magazines, including DCC Magazine, Digital Studio, and PC Graphics & Video. He currently enjoying the hell out of working in a new medium. He can be reached at fmoldstad@digitalmedianet.com.

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