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Today's World Wide Webpresents an ever-diversified experience of multimedia, programming languagesand real-time communication. Thereis no question that it is a challenge to keep up with the rapid pace ofdevelopments. The following presents a brief description of some of themore important trends to watch.
The Web has become a broadcast medium. It ispossible to listen to audio and video over the Web both pre-recorded and live.For example, you can visit the sites of various news organizations and view thesame videos shown on the nightly television news. Several plug-ins areavailable for viewing these videos. For example, Apple's Quick Time Playerdownloads files with the .mov extension and displayed these as"movies" in a small window on your computer screen. Quick Time filescan be quite large, and it may take patience to wait for the entire movie todownload into your computer before you can view it.
The problem if slow download times has beenanswered by a revolutionary development in multimedia capability: Streamingmedia. In this case, audio or video files are played as they are downloading orstreaming into your computer. Only a small wait, called buffering, is necessarybefore the file begins to play. The RealPlayer plug-in plays streaming audioand video files.
Extensive files such as interviews, speechesand hearings work very well with the RealPlayer.
The RealPlayer is also ideal for thebroadcast of real-time events. These may include press conferences, live radioand television broadcasts, concerts, etc. The Windows Media Player is anotherstreaming media player. Many sites offer the option to use one player or theother. A list of sites that make use of these programs is available on thepage, Multimedia on the Web. Shockwave presents another multimedia experience.Shockwave allows for the creation and implementation of an entire multimedia displaycombining graphics, animation and sound. Sound files, including music, may alsobe heard on the Web. It is not uncommon to visit a Web page and hear backgroundmusic. Sound files are also available for downloading independent of Web pagevisits. Sound files of many types are supported by the Web with the appropriateplug-ins. The MP3 file format, and the choice of supporting plug-ins, is thelatest music trend to sweep the Web. The famous Napster site allows for theexchange of MP3 files. Live cams are anther aspect of the multimedia experienceavailable on the Web. Live cams
are video camerasthat send their data in real time to a Web server. These cams may appear in allkinds of locations, both serious and whimsical: an office, on top of abuilding, a scenic locale, a special event, and so on.