Streaming media is everywhere now, even in our email. Through streaming media, one can listen to the radio, watch a show or video, and now more than ever, advertise. Here are a few of the best sites
out there for streaming media technology.
Broadcast.com, brainchild of Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, brings its visitors just about everything they could want when it comes to entertainment
and information. Since its merger with Net Events, Broadcast.com now appears as Yahoo! Events, but that has simply made the site even bigger. Broadcast.com has 10 categories to choose from, allowing
for both radio and televised events listed by topic, date, and time. There are even featured upcoming events listed on the main page.
Another streaming site that provides a plethora of content is
Real.com. In order to view or listen to anything on Real.com, one must have a Real Player, which can be download from the site. There are pay and free versions of the player. Like Broadcast.com, Real
has its content categorized. One can listen to the radio, view a television show, or watch the latest movie trailers on Real.com. Real also has another site, called RealNetworks.com, which is for
designers and developers.
Media is beginning to stream out of the email inbox, and TMXinteractive is one of the companies behind this technology. Rather than making files as attachments, TMX puts
them in the actual email, which adds only 5k to the e-mail’s original size. One section of TMXinteractive.com that works very well is the portfolio of past commercials. All the commercials are
clickable, short, and cover everything from Armani Exchange to Mike Tyson.
inChorus, like TMXinteractive, is a company that puts streaming media into email messages. Everything from voice, to
animation, to sound and graphics, are put into rich media emails that inChorus can manage, design, compose, and produce. The website, inChorus.com, has demos of products broken down into two
categories, professional and consumer. In order to view the consumer demos, a download is needed, but no download is needed to view the professional, though they are a bit slow to load.
Radical
Communication’s RadicalMail.com has extremely in depth product overviews, complete with a frequently asked questions segment. Clicking on “demos” could lead a surfer to confusion, though, as the first
thing one sees is an overview of a product. After scrolling to the right, however, one will see the clickable demos for that particular product. Unfortunately, there is a wait when it comes to the
loading time for the demos. In addition to overviews and demos, RadicalMail.com also has quite a lot of information on how its technology works, as well as company background.
EyeWonder.com is a
streaming media site that promotes EyeWonder’s products, and has demos of past advertisements. The good thing about the demo section of the website is that all the demos were encoded to be delivered
to a 56K connection, meaning most people can view them without a long wait. EyeWonder’s goal is to show it can distribute video and audio content to any user with a Java-enabled browser, regardless of
connection speed.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Streamingmedia.com is a site that has a wealth of information on the world of streaming media. Mostly focusing on the business side of things,
streamingmedia.com also features talk shows, and archives them so listeners can listen to them at their leisure. The website has previews of upcoming shows put on by Streaming Media, as well. The site
is divided into numerous categories, and even includes tutorials for the streaming media beginner. — Adam Bernard