Streaming ahead

Telecommunications, Jan, 2001 by Sanjima DeZoysa

* November 2000 -- GEG announces an arrangement with The Associated Press to stream video news to wireless devices via MPEG-4 compliant chips in a trial of GEO's technology.

* November 2000 -- Level 3 Communications announces an agreement with Yahoo! Holdings to co-locate in Level 3's advanced data centre in Hong Kong and use its dedicated international bandwidth services to provide digital media streaming services over the internet.

* November 2000 -- GEO launches next generation media applications for Nokia's new 9210 colour communicator which will be able to receive live and on-demand video news coverage, sports updates, weather reports and video messages.

Visionconsult streaming statistics

* 50 per cent of US streaming media users are expected to have broadband access by 2002;

* there are more than 700,000 streaming pages;

* 10,000 different content stream served a day;

* 6,000 new hours of new streaming programming created each week;

* around 60 million people are now watching or listening to streaming media per month;

* half a billion streams will be served in 2000;

* although currently in Europe, there are still under one million people with broadband access, the number is predicted to increase to 30 million broadband homes in the US and Europe by 2005; and

* 85 million broadband users to create a US$17 bn ([epsilon]19 bn) streaming market.