At a time when developers are feeling stretched for time, Veon is offering a drag-and-drop authoring tool that does not require programming skills. As Jody Sutter, East Coast Director of Content for Veon explains, "There's nothing harder for developers than trying to learn new software when they're knee-deep in everyday projects. As a result, the Veon authoring tool has a very simple interface, and the learning curve is not steep." Veon has created a partnership program for developers the company will introduce at an East and West coast developers conference in January. Craig Madill, Veon's Marketing Manager who is setting up the conferences, sees Veon's relationship with developers as integral to the company's success. As he explains, "Every major new technology that's ever caught on has always been launched with developers in mind. By providing resources in the form of training and networking events, we hope to learn what the developers need and expect."

VeonStudio has an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface.

The New York conference will be held in New York on January 11th and in Los Angeles on January 20th. Details on both events and registration are available on the Veon Web site. At the conferences, Veon will introduce version 3.0 of its technology platform. Although January 2000 is early in the development cycle of the company's Web-based suite, the product emerges from a previous life as V-Active, an authoring program used to produce content for the Web and CD-ROMs. Bridget Leray, Director of Business Development for Veon, sees the V-Active legacy as a plus because the software features are so appropriate for broadband. As she points out, "The newest additions to version 3.0 are very Web-oriented, but they address the needs of a developer who is building an nonlinear presentation online. Examples include an HTML generator, a preview-in-browser feature, a media swap function valuable for projects that use a template, and support for ad hotspots inside video frames." Developers who want to experiment with Veon's software can download the Veon Player, VeonStudio, the manual, two tutorials and samples files.

Who's Distributing Digital Video?
Developers who have already tried serving video files on the Internet sometimes ask about distribution after discovering low frame rates due to congestion on an Internet with too many router hops. One option for solving congestion is distribution over a private broadband network. Excite@Home, AOL's new AOL Plus network and Time Warner's Roadrunner can guarantee a desirable level of bandwidth that is predictable. Another option for improving the quality of video streams is distribution through one or more of the companies developing a reputation for delivering high-bandwidth content. The Drew Carey Webcast, streamed through a Real Media window, was distributed by iBeam, Enron and Akamai.

The Drew Carey Webcast was distributed by iBeam, Enron and Akamai.

iBEAM, Enron and Akamai Technologies are three companies that are solving the "router hop" problem in the background. Although each company has a unique solution the objective is the same -- route data closer to the end user to minimize delays in delivery. New business relationships for moving high bandwidth content on the Internet imitate the cable industry where companies such as CNN and QVC pay satellite companies to distribute their content. Deals for the distribution of content are not exclusive and may overlap. For example, iBeam, Enron and Akamai all provided distribution for ABC's Drew Carey Webcast in November.

Popular pricing models include MBytes transferred or Megabits/sec-peak on a monthly basis . The decision regarding which pricing model to use will depend on the regularity of network traffic to a Web site. If a site gets very irregular traffic with unanticipated spikes, the MBytes transferred model is preferable. In this model, a content company pays for every bit of data that leaves a distributor’s data center. If traffic is fairly consistent, then a content company may be able squeeze more data out of the megabits/sec peak pricing model – but it is riskier. In this model, pricing follows a “95th percentile” rule which means a month’s worth of peaks are examined, the top 5% are discarded and a content company is charged at the 95th peak rate for the month.