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"Imagine you're a kid in a small town somewhere."
Jon Luini of San Francisco's MediaCast is gazing out the window of his
company's fifth-floor office. The Bay sparkles in the distance. "And you're
really into music, but bands never come to your town. You're lucky if you can
even get the latest CDs.
"But you've got a computer, and you've got a phone line. So when a band
is playing live somewhere you can come to the MediaCast Web site and still
experience the event -- live -- with thousands of other fans online."
"This is a whole new way to experience concerts," says Jon Fox,
MediaCast's other Jon. "It's something that's interactive -- that's better
than TV."
At the center of the process is Pacific Bell ISDN, which MediaCast relies on
to get the pictures and sound from the venue to their offices. "(ISDN is)
basically a bigger pipe," says Jon Luini. "So we can provide more for
our audience -- RealAudioTM sound, high-quality
video, live chats with the artist. With regular phone lines we couldn't provide
such a rich experience."
"Another nice benefit is that if people in our audience have ISDN, too,
they get amazingly clear sound. And that's all the difference in the world for
anything that's complex audio content, such as music."
Or, even if it's not music.
"We did the first Cyber-Luau on the Net," says Jon Fox.
"Together with Global Artists and Windham Hill. We had, you know, hula
dancers, a pig roast -- and some of Hawaii's best slack key guitarists
playing."
A welcome respite if you're snowed-in someplace, longing for a visit to exotic
foreign lands.
Other netcasts have offered more than just entertainment. An example is the
Future of Hope Conference in Hiroshima, Japan, which used teleconferencing to
link Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Shimon Peres in Israel, and Jimmy Carter in
Atlanta with Eli Weisel and the rest of the conference participants in Hiroshima.
MediaCast put the event up on the Internet, and also made it possible for Carter
to participate by linking him to Hiroshima via an ISDN line.
"Compared with using satellites the Internet is a much less costly way to
do a teleconference," says Jon Fox. "And people all over the world can
log on live and attend."
Making sure a kid in a faraway town sees his favorite band often depends on
MediaCast's close relationship with Pacific Bell. "Being able to work
together closely with Pac Bell makes pulling these (netcasts) off much easier and
much smoother," says Jon Luini. "Whereas otherwise we'd have to tell
artists, 'Oh, you only have that much time? Sorry we just plain can't do it,'
with the relationship we have now with Pac Bell we can say, 'Well, hold on. We'll
get back to you and we'll find out if we can do it.' We give Pac Bell a call, and
usually the answer is, 'Yeah, we can do it.'"
And suddenly that small town's not so isolated.
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