Slide into "Thin Streaming"

Someday soon Internet video-on-demand will democratize video distribution, allowing everyone the opportunity to distribute video to a worldwide audience without having a multi-billion dollar television-broadcasting studio. But what is there to do in the meantime? How can I put my productions on the Internet today? The answer lies in the slideshow.

I remember the first time I watched video-on-demand via the Internet. "Amazing," I thought to myself as I clicked on the button that started the video. Having already downloaded and installed the utility that allowed this technological miracle, I was ready to experience "click-and-watch" video. What a letdown. The video was tiny, roughly the size of a saltine cracker on my 17-inch monitor. The picture was barely discernible, with large digital-artifacts appearing where the software's compression utility hadn't quite done its math correctly. The most obvious problem was the lack of motion. The video sputtered along at two or three frames per second. I had almost given up hope for Internet video, when I remembered how I was connected to the Internet: through an old, slow, copper phone wire. Then I imagined the super-fast connection the phone companies are promising over the next couple of years. If they can transmit almost-video over my ancient phone line now, full-motion, full-screen video-on-demand will be a reality when the super-fast Internet connection comes. Until then, I can distribute my work on the Web in the form of a slideshow.

Internet slideshows are a fast and inexpensive way to get your ideas out to a mass audience, without having to resort to slow, chunky and tiny video. By using the basic story-telling concepts of a storyboard (see "Back To School Storyboard" in the February issue of Videomaker), you can easily turn any video into a multimedia web-based slideshow. Slideshows also play great on a television, opening your Web slideshow to a wider potential audience of WebTV s…