The 1990's saw the first wave of the digital revolution. Digital production has made producing moving images and sound quicker, more productive, and cheaper than ever before. For nothing more than the price of an iMac and a DV camcorder, it's now possible to shoot and edit a program with perfect digital clarity. The only limitations are imagination, experience, and talent.

The lines are now being drawn on the next big battlefield of the convergence revolution: While digital production has radically changed the production side of the business of image making, digital delivery promises to alter media distribution just as fundamentally. This disruptive technology is forever changing the rules of who gets to use the tools of mass media.

Internet Delivery for Communicators

Consider, for example, file sharing technologies such as Napster, Gnutella, and Kazaa, which have made the distribution (or piracy) of music as easy as point-and-click. Regardless of which side you take in the copyright dispute, it's impossible not to acknowledge that the recording industry is in the midst of a fundamental shift, driven by digital delivery. Watch out, movie studios, you're probably next.

But while content producers who derive their revenues from selling media are in for a wild ride for the next few years, communicators in corporations and other organizations now can wield an unexpectedly powerful new tool. Rather than needing to own a television network, or to spend millions on direct mailing or advertising, even the smallest companies, organizations, or even individuals, can have global reach.

As an open network, the internet is infinitely scalable. Once a web site goes live, the difference in cost between serving dozens of users and millions is close to nothing. At the same time, though, the internet offers something that traditional media cannot. Unlike traditional broadcasting, a "push technology," the internet is a "pull" technology. As such, it offers a user experience customized to exactly what each user wants to see. Users can search out, skip ahead or review content at will.

Internet media is an experience quite unlike watching television, even with hundreds of channels and remote in hand. Because it serves a new type of participantñone who "pulls" from the internet in search of informationñthis new delivery opportunity requires a new approach, and new expertise.

Angle Park helps communicators reach an internet audience with high-quality audio and video streaming, but that's only one aspect of its service. The company also helps its clients understand the context of a web media user experience, how it differs from other media, and how to use it to communicate effectively

Specialized Solutions for Exhibitors

Digital delivery is not limited to the internet. In fact, the same technology that makes it possible to stream audio and video across the web works even better in a hardware kiosk or small network. Today, cheap, off-the-shelf computer technology offers full-screen, full-motion video along with interactive navigation.

Exhibitors are often faced with unique physical space challenges, especially when communicating complex messages with text and graphics. By taking advantage of the time visitors are in an exhibit area, well-designed audio and video elements convey information incredibly efficiently, tying together disparate concepts into a unified whole.

For exhibitors, Angle Park brings creative production expertise together with custom-authored hardware solutions. Often using off-the-shelf desktop computers, these solutions are less expensive than dedicated video playback hardware. Based on standard operating systems and computer platforms, they're also easier to maintain.

In addition, digitally delivered solutions are often scalable. Adding three more kiosks to a trade show is simply a matter of adding three more computers. Expanding a museum's educational reach on the web can be as simple as recompressing and reauthoring the video streams used full-screen in an exhibit.

Closing the Loop... Digitally

The businesses of traditional advertising and market research are, in the final analysis, based on statistics. Network ratings and audience testing is based on interpolated data in which a random sample is projected statistically onto a larger population.

Digital delivery technology, on the other hand, is based on actual data. As each server on the internet serves up text, images, and digital media, each user's mouse clicks are recorded in an access log which provides a detailed, time-based record of user behavior. When closely analyzed, this data provides critical guidance. While analysis requires more effort, the goal is to provide the shortest path between the content and the participant.

For instance, after examining web logs in late 1999, Angle Park realized that users seemed to be heading elsewhere if they had trouble watching video clips, offered only in the QuickTime format at the time. So rather than insisting that visitors download a particular browser plug-in or playerñan interaction with something besides the Angle Park web siteñthe company now provides streams in each major format, closing the loop as much as possible around various users, media formats, computer platforms, and delivery speeds. After adding Real and Windows Media options, the average time spent at anglepark.com rose by over 10 minutes.