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From Downloading to Streaming

Revved-up video clips may be the way broadband is going, but that wasn't always true. The early wave of broadband adopters didn't value such clips all that highly. Instead, most early broadbanders fell into two (sometimes overlapping) categories: business users and MP3 freaks.

For business users, the benefits of an always-on connection, fast downloads, and simultaneous phone have outweighed the entertainment value of broadband. And the younger users driving the MP3 scene have not been overly concerned with high-quality video. They use their connections for fast downloads, and unlike streaming files, straight downloads of MPEG and MP3 files don't need to be tweaked based on access speeds.

Now a new, more casual wave of users is arriving on the broadband scene. This broader audience wants to browse Web sites; shop and compare prices; and sample news clips, movie trailers, and music. And this is just what some sites have to offer.

Early Days

But the broadband "revolution" goes only so far. While higher-bandwidth clips are on the rise, it's still fairly rare to see truly rich graphic displays, colorful backgrounds, 3D-looking objects, and lots of photos, icons, and graphics.

Despite the hype about how broadband will boost e-commerce sales, few online stores offer more than a single, low-resolution photo of a product, let alone videos, slide shows, or animations. And few Web sites (with the exception of porn sites) have taken advantage of broadband users' capacity for viewing larger, higher-resolution photographs.

Broadband content poses a problem for content sites because it slows down dialup operations, points out Emily Meehan, an analyst at the Yankee Group.

Just as a 24X CD-ROM drive won't give you 20 times better video if the video was encoded for a 4X CD-ROM, a 560-kbps broadband connection won't give you 20 times better quality on a clip designed for 28.8-kbps modem users. Broadband can help reduce some of the buffering problems of media files encoded for slower connections, but it does little to help the small screen sizes, washed-out audio, pixelated images, and poor lighting.

For tips on getting the best viewing experience, see the "Buckle Up for Your Broadband Tour" link at right. And whatever your DSL or cable provider might have told you, don't expect clips to work at more than 300 kbps (see the "Broadband Hits the Speed Limit" link at right).

You may wait quite some time before you'll have media experiences that truly exploit your broadband connection. But in the meantime, there's plenty to see out there at 300 kbps. It may not be TV, but most of it is watchable.