Is streaming media becoming mainstream?

INTRODUCTION The amount of text available on the web is orders of magnitude greater than the amount of streaming media. A recent study indicates that less than 1% of documents on the web include streaming media links [AshourOl 1. Text continues to be the primary information source today with media being peripheral, if at all. In parallel, the resources for locating relevant information contained in streaming media, such as search engines, web directories and portals are not as well developed as those for text. What is the problem here? Is it the lack of resources for media that are an impediment to making media mainstream? Or is it the lack of compelling reasons to use media the reason for the lack of resources? The indexing challenges offered by the unstructured, spatio-temporal nature of media together with the lack of universal media standards largely accounts for this [Chang98, Gupta97, Jones96, Wactlar99, Zhang961. Further, media offers additional complexity due to content rights protection issues that prevent free sharing of media. This panel brings together experts from the today’s leading streaming media formats together with representatives of o p e n standards for media. They are Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL), MPEG-4, Real Media, Windows Media and QuickTime. The goal of this panel is to explore, discuss and come to a better understanding of the following issues: