Few people who watch video on the Internet have ever heard of Burst.com. Even folks who work in the "streaming industry" and call themselves experts regard Burst.com as a relative newcomer to the field. RealNetworks, which became the early leader, and Microsoft, which put a lot of resources into catching up with Real, dominate the delivery of audio and video on the Internet. But Lang says that his company has long had admirers -- including the rock group U2.

In 1990, U2 became minority owners in Burst.com -- then called Instant Video Technologies -- with an investment of $2 million. The band wanted "to give something back to [our] fans," U2's lead guitarist, the Edge, said to the Hollywood Reporter at the time. But the band was also charmed by Lang's long view. In 1983, Lang had co-founded, with Terren Dunlap, a company called Go Video, which sold a then controversial (now passé) dual-deck VCR. By the late 1980s, Lang says, he was certain that videotapes were soon going to become obsolete, "and my focus started to shift to what would follow them." His determination that magnetic tapes would be replaced by electronic pulses of video traveling through networks -- even though such networks at the time were more a pipe dream than a certainty -- attracted investors, like U2, who liked to think big.

The band members and other investors were told that the company didn't expect to become an overnight success. "What we said to U2 at the time was to expect no technology for at least five years," Lang says. He explained to investors that although the company had some grand concepts for video delivery, the specific technologies still had to be invented. Back then, indeed, Lang had no idea that he would be sending video over the Internet -- satellite, cable, online services, and the vague but much hyped 500-channel "information superhighway" seemed the best ways to do it.

In 2000, in an effort to signal to customers that the firm had something to do with the Internet, Instant Video Technologies was re-christened Burst.com. ("Talk about bad timing," Lang says now of the name change.) The firm was named Burst because "bursting," as opposed to "streaming," is central to how Lang, in the early 1990s, determined that media should be delivered over a network as inherently temperamental as the Internet. Lang says that streaming data over a network, the standard way of sending Internet video since the mid-1990s, is conceptually identical to television or radio broadcasting: A video is played at the TV station, the pictures are encoded and pushed over the airwaves in real time, and when they get to your TV, they're decoded and projected onto the screen. In streaming, everything is digitized, and the airwaves are replaced by the Internet.

But Burst.com saw this model as flawed, because the Internet isn't like the airwaves -- it's more like a system of suburban freeways. The route between any two computers changes from moment to moment, becoming free at one instant, clogged the next. Lang's technology recognizes this fluidity -- and capitalizes on it. When the connection between the broadcasting computer and the receiving one is free, the server "bursts" a large segment of the video to the viewer, which can store the extra information on the computer's hard drive. The system is smart and elegant, and it leads to significantly better video -- so good, in fact, that Microsoft, which started out streaming, now uses a variation of bursting in its latest video player.

But Burst.com's media-delivery method did not catch on in the marketplace. The company's researchers spent most of the early '90s researching the burst technology and, Lang says, "building up our patent portfolio." That deliberateness seems to have been Burst's first, and perhaps its pivotal, mistake. Instead of rushing to market with something that worked but wasn't perfect, it waited.

And Burst was upstaged: In the summer of 1995, a Seattle company called Progressive Networks announced it had solved the problem of delivering audio over the Web. Its software, called RealAudio, compressed sound files and "streamed" them over the Internet. The audio quality wasn't very good, and the player often skipped and sputtered over a dial-up connection, but the company, founded by a former Microsoft executive named Rob Glaser, was an instant hit. Many major radio stations and networks soon signed on to its vision of streaming media. (In 1997, Progressive Networks, which by this time was delivering both RealAudio and RealVideo, changed its name to RealNetworks.)

And when streaming became the dominant metaphor for media delivery, Lang says, "that whole momentum that Real created really pushed people off our idea, which was bursting."

The technical differences between bursting and streaming are complex, but at bottom, which you prefer is suggestive of your worldview. A streamer is essentially an optimist, one who believes the Internet is reliable enough to broadcast, in a steady "stream," the thousands of bits of information that compose a video and to get them to their destination relatively intact. When you stream data, you send it in real time: A one-hour video takes an hour to send. By doing this, says Lang, you're implicitly making an assumption about the network. You're deciding that the network works and that it will work for the full duration of the show you're sending.

A burster is a pessimist. Lang doesn't trust the Internet; he sees it as inherently unreliable. You can't count on its being up and at full capacity for the full duration of your program, he says, and "so what we did was say, when there's more bandwidth" -- when the network is not busy -- "you deliver more." You don't wait the full hour to send the show but, instead, send it "faster than real time," transmitting the whole video in the few minutes that the network might be working well.

But the streaming metaphor was more attractive than the bursting metaphor, says Richard Doherty, the director of the Envisioneering Group, a technology research firm. "Everyone loved the word 'stream' because it sounded smooth and dependable," he says. "It's easy to understand. Nobody wanted to use the word 'bursty' media, 'machine-gun' media. People wanted to stream."

Recent Stories