LOS ANGELES-"Hey, all you geeks out there. Both hands on the keyboard!"
With those words Mimi Bobeck, Mr. Wick's assistant and Drew Carey's nemesis on The Drew Carey Show, kicked off one of the most ambitious experiments in convergence programming to date. The Nov. 17 Drew-Cam episode of ABC's highly rated Drew Carey Show marked the first time a large-scale streaming-video Webcast was used to enhance the content of a prime-time network television show.
Showcasing Microsoft's Windows Media technology, Warner Bros. Online produced Drew-Cam in association with ABC.com, whose network heavily promoted the episode. The Webcast delivered 1.9 million streams to viewers in three time zones - apparently the highest number for a streaming-media event.
The experience was primitive, to be sure; viewers had to set their PCs and TVs side by side. Some viewers were unable to access the stream or experienced slow-downs - freezes and color shifts that have plagued other Webcasts. Drew-Cam nonetheless marked the first time a group of online network providers pooled their bandwidth and expertise for a streaming-media event. (Previous large-scale streaming-media events, like NetAid and ABC's Fiesta Bowl were single-provider affairs.)
For Jim Banister, WBO executive VP, relying on a single-network provider is like "sticking a 2,000-pound weight in the middle of your floor: It'll drop right through. But if you spread the weight over a wider area, it will hold. That's what we did; [we] created a much more efficient distribution system."
The Webcam was integral to the episode's storyline, says Bruce Helford, the show's creator and executive producer. In the episode, Carey's employer, the Winfred-Louder Department store, talks him into becoming a 24-7 pitchman for the stores' products. Webcams are set up in Carey's living room, kitchen and workplace.
While there was some overlap with the TV broadcast, the Webcast featured many gags that the TV audience didn't see. In one sequence the cam points at Mr. Wick's office while a woman scantily clad in a dominatrix-cowgirl getup tries to lure him inside. Some of the more elaborate jokes occur in Carey's apartment when he isn't home: His dog lets the neighborhood mutts into the kitchen to romp, ghosts re-enact a murder in the living room, and Ed McMahon drops by with a $10 million check. (He leaves with the check when no one's home.) The Webcast ran without audio, since employing sound would have made it and the broadcast fall out of sync for most viewers.
The idea for the show came from Michael Becker, an ABC creative consultant, and Helford embraced it. He knew that millions of Drew Carey fans have Internet access, and that a large number set up their PCs and TVs in the same room. Last year, ABC.com's servers were overwhelmed when viewers flocked to the site to participate in a Drew Carey April Fools' Day contest.
Given the green light, Helford began to prepare scenes for the Webcast. Most of the ideas were shot down by show director Sam Simon, and by the show's star, Drew Carey, who's something of a Web-head. "You can't do regular scenes for the Web," Helford says. "It's a tiny little picture. Little jokes get lost."
Helford then ran into another problem: ABC does not own the Internet rights to The Drew Carey Show. Those belong to Warner Bros., where the show was produced. WBO's Banister and John Kaufman, director of technology, began meeting last June with Helford, executives from ABC.com and Debra Oppenheimer, the show's other executive producer. On the cusp of rolling out an online entertainment hub, Entertaindom, WBO regarded the Drew Carey Webcast as a great promotional opportunity.
"We've been focused on trying to figure out clever ways to get bigger streaming-media audiences," Banister says. The fierce competition between the two online units was the greatest obstacle to getting the Webcast off the ground, insiders say. The units tangled for more than six weeks over who would host the Webcast, how traffic would be shared, and details of promotion and advertising.
Neither online unit ended up hosting the site. Instead, they temporarily set up Winloud.com (for Winfred-Louder Department store), which would host the Webcast. ABC.com and WBO linked to Winloud from their sites.
The one remaining question was, Who would be the lead technology partner? ABC has an ongoing relationship with RealNetworks, while WBO has worked with Microsoft on streaming-media issues for Entertaindom. Executives at WBO felt that Microsoft's Windows Media technology was superior to RealNetworks', particularly at high-bandwidth levels.
What cinched the deal for Microsoft was the view within WBO that RealNetworks was a competitor. With the launch of RealNetworks' Take 5 programming service, the company "came out of the closet," says Banister. "They're a media company that's finally admitting they're a media company."
Michael Aldridge, Microsoft's streaming-media product manager, and WBO's Banister and Kaufman assembled a consortium of technology partners for the Webcast. The Drew-Cam episode would be aired live in three time zones and could potentially draw hundreds of thousands of Web viewers. A Webcast of that size would put a strain on the capacity of even the largest network providers. The list of partners swelled to include Akamai, Don Mischer New Media, Edge Networks, E-Media, Enron Communications, Globex, iBeam, Intervu, Sandpiper Networks and Sonic Foundary Media Services.
Several participants, like iBeam and Akamai, are edge-network companies that attempt to bypass network congestion on the Internet - a big problem for Webcasts - by "getting content out to the edge." That is, by delivering content directly to tens of hundreds of servers located at ISPs and data centers on the Net.
Drew-Cam required an unprecedented degree of collaboration among the various network providers. "This has caused everyone to stop and say, 'How much are we duplicating each other?'" says Banister. "Without this catalyst, these companies would never have come together or had reason to do this kind of analysis."
WBO had a lot riding on the event. The company plans to use the same technology partners to preview the new Metallica album during the week of Nov. 19. "It better work," Banister said before the show.
The night of the Drew-Cam episode, WBO executives didn't allow reporters into the "mission-control center," as they referred to their Los Angeles offices.
An engineer on a conference call on the East Coast ticked off the seconds until the broadcast went live. "It was like launching the space shuttle," says WBO's Kaufman. Despite a hush-hush pre-air mishap, the actual broadcast-Webcast went off like clockwork. The teamwork among the various entities involved in the Webcast, says Kaufman, was "amazing. We all worked as one unit to get this thing done."
By the end of the third broadcast, 1.9 million streams had been delivered. Anecdotally, viewers who had fast connections or whose local networks were fed content from one of the consortium's edge servers had no problems. Some viewers experienced slowing data rates and freezing video images, requiring that they reaccess the stream.
"One of the problems with streaming media is that we have no good way of evaluating the actual [user] experience," says Peter Christy, VP at Internet Research Group, a content-delivery company. New systems for measuring streaming-media performance will likely become available in the next six months, Christy adds.
At one point, the Webcast ran over into one of the commercial breaks on the network show, creating a competition for viewers' attention. How advertisers will deal with such counter-programming is not clear.
Christy believes that if Webcasts like Drew-Cam - which attracted 17.6 million television viewers - help to resolve some of the scaling issues in Webcasting, "then the economics of use really changes in a way we think will lead to explosive new use."
For more in-depth coverage of the Internet Economy, visit The Industry Standard, a sister publication to Network World. Copyright 1999 The Industry Standard. All rights reserved.
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