ENTERTAINMENT AT ITS BEST: A screenshot from www.heavy.com

With BSNL providing breakneck Internet speed, you can have great fun with web video content

While you were asleep after a night of frenetic partying earlier this month, the state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd jacked up its broadband speed to a blistering 2 mbps. Not long ago, we used to painfully surf the web at a meagre 64 kilobits per second. Our choice of sites was limited. Then came broadband with speeds up to 512 kbps and we smiled as pictures, audio and software downloaded pretty fast. Downloading podcasts was still a little slow. And videocasts seemed to take forever.

Now your typical 256-kbps connection can get you download speeds of at least 1 mbps or even 2 mbps, depending on your demand. For example, if your were downloading a movie or video conferencing, you could expect your connection speed to go up. So on a good day, you could download a standard English movie in anything between 30 minutes and three hours, depending on your connection speed. A two-hour movie is usually around 1.5 GB.

If all the bits and bytes is getting you confused, just remember that in data communications, we measure speed in bits per second. Here, the metric system is followed. One kilobit = 1,000 bits. This is because although the bit is a unit of the binary number system, bits in data communications are discrete signal pulses and have historically been counted using the decimal number system. On the other hand, storage is measured in Bytes. One Kilobyte is equal to 1,024 Bytes. And 1 GB is 1,024 MB.

So what are you going to do with the breakneck Internet speed from BSNL’s Dataone service? BSNL has tied up for Internet Protocol TV with IOL Broadband and the service will be launched in April in Calcutta. IPTV is different from traditional video streaming over the Internet. In IPTV, television programmes will be delivered over your broadband network to a set-top box that connects to your TV. This will provide a third option to viewers, apart from Direct to Home (DTH) and Cable TV. Services will include pay-per-view and interactive TV.

But right away, you can have a very good experience of Web video content. If you want to get some really good golfing tips for free, head to GolfSpan at www.golfspan.com. Their silver membership entitles you to 30 free videos and no registration is required. The Internet is now teeming with such sites that let anyone with very basic video and audio tools to reach an audience. YouTube is the biggest of such sites. You make a video and upload it. A program automatically converts it to a Flash video so that it streams to users seamlessly. Then there is Yahoo! Videos at video.yahoo.com. The advantage of this site is that it takes less than 10 minutes to upload a three-minute clip compared to almost 30 minutes at YouTube.

There are many sites that take advantage of broadband to provide content that is either entertaining or full of information or is just good fun. Here are some sites that you can now watch fairly easily with a faster broadband connection.

Video sharing

One of the best places on the web to create, share and watch videos is Grouper (www.grouper.com). There is a huge selection of clips and thousands are added daily. You can instantly share a video that you record with your webcam at this site. Another video sharing site, www.vMix.com, was formed by artists, musicians and executives who had launched the original www.mp3.com website. This site, too, encourages creative videos and uploading is fairly simple.

Viewmagazine

A great place to watch a convergence of several media disciplines from print to TV journalism to advertising is www.viewmagazine.tv. This site strives to make newspapers and magazines look like television. It is an example of personalised journalism by journalists.

Animation, films

W!LDBRAIN is an award-winning entertainment company that develops and produces unique and compelling content across the media spectrum. Powered by a talented pool of directors, animators and production staff, the site has somehow managed to blur the line between cartoon and art. Two other terrific sites are www.heavy.com and www.nosepilot.com.

Atom Entertainment aggregates the best casual games in shockwave, short films and animations. You can spend hours browsing www.atomfilms.com and its different genres from science fiction to comedy and horror to action films.

Artmuseum

The story behind the evolution of multimedia — its precedents, unsung heroes and the extraordinary creative work and visionary thinking of artists and scientists are the current theme of www.artmuseum.net. It is titled “Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality”. The clever navigational aids help visitors discover the relationships that connect ideas and concepts.

Finally, a word of advice. You may think your computer is equipped with all the latest media player programs. But by visiting these broadband sites, you will realise how many more players are out there, not to mention new versions of old players. If a site prompts you to update your current version of QuickTime, Flash, RealPlayer or Windows Media Player, it is a good idea to do so. But do not install any obscure players as they will clutter your computer and mess around with the default player for file formats.

Send in your computer related problems to askdoss@abpmail.com.

This column will appear every fortnight.