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Progressive Networks'
CEO Rob Glaser
Progressive's CEO Glaser discusses issues for building your own audio-enhanced Web site, and RealAudio 2.0 as the backbone of synchronized multimedia over the Web.
Interview by Matthew Carter and Jim Fawcette
1996
As the World Wide Web left the high-bandwidth world of universities and corporate LANs and entered into the narrowband world of people's homes, broadcasting audio became impractical. Seattle, Wash.-based Progressive Networks was one of the first companies to break through the bandwidth barrier to Internet broadcasting by compressing sound files and enabling "live" programming with its RealAudio product.
RealAudio allows users to "tune in" to live and prerecorded audio clips compressed and hosted on Web sites. While today's RealAudio sound doesn't get near that of a compact disk, the quality of the audio, even over a standard 14.4 modem, is quite listenable, and reminds the user of listening to AM radio. Progressive Networks CEO Rob Glaser discussed issues facing Web developers wishing to incorporate live and recorded audio on their Web sites with Fawcette Technical Publications' Matthew Carter and Jim Fawcette.
Q: What are the barriers to offering a streaming audio site on the Internet?
A: We've done the best to make the entry point as easy as possible, and then to have a set of extensibility. At the entry point, you can run the RealAudio server on the same machine as your Web server. And the RealAudio Server has an encoder piece as well as a server. What the encoder does is take audio from any digitized form or from audio source and encode the file in real time from AU, WAV, AIFF and it stores it as a file. Then, the server software serves it up. The user knows about the file from a link on the Web page to the RealAudio file. In a typical case, the link connects to a RealAudio metafile, which then points to the URL of the audio file.
The user clicks on the link and it tells the Web browser to bring up the Web browser and it plays the file. You need to configure your Web server to recognize the RealAudio MIME type, which is trivial, and once you're there, you're off to the races. If you want to serve up a live stream, like a sporting event or a rock concert or a political speech or this interview or what have you, in that case there's a special form of the encoder which is the live encoder which is also pure software. The difference (between the live encoder and the standard encoder) is that the live encoder only runs on Windows 95 or Windows NT today, although it will be running on other platforms over time. Unless you're running on a very fast machine, you'll want to run the live encoder on a separate machine from the RealAudio server itself.
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