We got a copy of RealProducer Plus from RealNetworks and downloaded RealServer Basic from the company's Web site. A license key provided by RealNetworks upgraded our server to RealServer Plus with splitting enabled.

Encoding our test clips at multiple bandwidths was a snap: We simply transferred the resulting RealVideo files to the RealServer content directory, and we were in business. Live encoding was similarly straightforward.

To get a feel for the platform's end-user tools, we created a slide show using a copy of RealSlideshow Plus, provided by RealNetworks. The software let us easily record audio narration for a series of images, then export the result as a set of Real Media streams integrated using SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, pronounced "smile") 1.0. An alternative is to use the RealPresenter Plus product, which works within Microsoft PowerPoint. Both are easy to use and produce an effective result. The RealServer is administered through a Web interface. Layout and navigation are intuitive, and online help is available. RealNetworks and Microsoft are both far ahead of Apple in the administration category.

We created a SMIL file from scratch to integrate a streaming video with a slide show. This process was tedious because we had to specify the timings by hand, but it worked fine. You can also integrate RealPix (streaming images) and RealText with your video and images. RealNetworks' SMIL implementation and extensive documentation help you manage potential bandwidth constraints, via media preroll and switch statements, to deliver a quality experience to your clients. In addition, RealNetworks offers a complete content-creation guide in PDF format that is very helpful when you're creating streaming image, text, audio and video content, and integrating those elements in a final presentation. In fact, these guides were complemented by complete and reader-friendly instruction sets for RealProducer and RealServer as well. Documentation is another area where RealNetworks shines.

For example, an entire chapter of the RealServer Administration Guide is devoted to explaining the two types of splitting possible in RealServer: push splitting and pull splitting (for more information on RealNetworks' splitting capabilities, see "Splitting Up Is Easy To Do"). Step-by-step instructions and explanations are peppered with useful screenshots; such helpful features are largely missing from the Microsoft and Apple help-file documentation.

RealServer Plus 7.0, $1,995; RealProducer Plus 8, $149.95; RealPresenter Plus 8, $99.95; RealPlayer 8 Plus, $29.99; RealSlideshow Plus, $69.95, RealNetworks, (888) 768-3248, (206) 674-2700; fax (206) 674-2698. www.realnetworks.com.

Microsoft Windows Media Technologies

Microsoft Windows Media Technologies consists of the Windows Media Encoder 7, Windows Media Services 4.1 and Windows Media Player 6.4 or 7. We installed Windows 2000, and with it we got Windows Media Services. On our Windows NT 4.0 box, we downloaded Windows Media Encoder 7 from the Microsoft Windows Media Web site and installed it.

Encoding a static AVI file is simple. You start a new encoding session in Windows Media Encoder and tell the wizard that you want to convert a file. Control over target bandwidths is handled through profiles. Default profiles handle a variety of scenarios -- video for LAN, DSL or cable modem -- and you can edit these to create custom profiles for your application. Once you create an encoded Windows Media video file, you transfer it to the ASFRoot directory on the Window Media server; client players can then stream it.

We tried two approaches for integrating media. One mechanism is aimed at end users: It provides an encoder add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint that lets users generate live slide-show broadcast from within PowerPoint. Users can also record a narration for each slide and generate a Windows Media video file that combines the audio with images synchronized by the timings recorded in the presentation. We chose to save to a file, and that worked without a hitch.

The other media integration method we tried is available in the Windows Media Encoder. URL scripts can be added to a live or on-demand stream, and you can edit those scripts after the fact with the asf index utility. This is straightforward, though we found no explanation in the help files on how to target a URL to a browser frame. An article on the Microsoft Developer Network site, at msdn.microsoft.com/WindowsMedia, covers this -- if you choose Windows Media, you'll make regular use of this resource.

Live encoding is straightforward. You configure a live source in the encoder and then create a publishing point on your server that points to that encoder. We had no problems implementing this. You can also unicast as many as 50 streams directly from an encoder installed on any Microsoft Windows 98, NT, 2000 or Millennium system, enabling a simple implementation.

The GUI-based Windows Media administrative and monitoring interfaces are useful and intuitive. You get easy, hyperlink access to help files, though they are occasionally less than helpful. Through this interface, you can set up an entity, called a "station," which is used to deliver multicast streams or to distribute (split) a broadcast to other servers.

Our first effort to set up a station failed because we lacked a proper stream format file, which has to be generated by Windows Media Encoder and then imported onto the server. This is mentioned in the encoder documentation. Unfortunately, the server documentation is out of date -- it indicated a need for an ASD file, a type no longer supported in Windows Media Encoder 7. Once our distribution station was set up, we instructed it to distribute a persistent, simulated live broadcast by looping through a static file in the ASFRoot directory. We then set up a publishing point on our second Windows Media server to rebroadcast the unicast stream from the remote station. Getting the static file to stream as a pseudo-live broadcast was difficult because poor documentation made setup of the station a confusing process.

Microsoft claims to offer the most scalable platform for Windows 2000 because the company can tweak its code to more effectively leverage Win2K's performance features. This makes sense to us. Of course, RealNetworks and Apple run on a variety of platforms, thereby providing a wider range of hardware and OS options from which to address scalability.

The Windows Media platform has a full feature set. The problem is that you may have to spend considerable time and effort getting all those features up and running. The help files are generally useful, but occasionally you'll need more comprehensive treatment of a complex topic, and the online help-file system isn't enough.

Windows Media Technologies 7: Windows Media Encoder 7, Windows Media Player 7, Windows Media Player 6.4 (for Windows 95 and NT), Windows Media Services 4.1, price included in the Windows operating system, Microsoft Corp., (800) 426-9400, (425) 882-8080; fax (425) 706-7329. www.microsoft.com/windowsmedia.

Apple Computer QuickTime 4.1.2

To stream QuickTime in our test environment, we used the open-source Darwin Streaming Server, which is a free download from Apple's QuickTime Web site, and QuickTime Pro, which is a $29.99 upgrade to the basic QuickTime player.

We started by encoding our basic 192-by-144-pixel AVI clips using QuickTime Pro. We first had to save our video as a self-contained file, compress it, then prepare it for streaming by hinting it. This was cumbersome compared with the slicker processes of both RealNetworks and Windows Media. We copied the file to the Darwin server Movies directory, and we were able to stream across the network.

Unfortunately, because we lacked the Sorenson Video Pro 2 third-party compressor, the image quality was inferior to the encoding results achieved with Windows Media or RealNetworks. To get quality comparable with what RealNetworks and Windows Media enable, the Sorenson Video Pro 2 compressor is a must.

We consider QuickTime's reliance on third-party products a negative: To do live broadcasting, you must have a Mac and Sorenson Broadcaster. To encode at multiple bit rates, generate encoding statistics or do batch encoding, you're told to acquire Media Cleaner 5 from Terran Interactive in addition to Sorenson Video Pro 2. With these, high-quality streaming video can be achieved. You can verify this by going to the QuickTime Web site at www.apple.com/quicktime and viewing some of the very-high-quality streaming samples. You'll have to spend hundreds of dollars for this additional software: Sorenson Broadcaster sells for $199, Sorenson Video Pro 2 is $499, and Media Cleaner 5 costs $599. But compared with the cost of RealNetworks' solution, Mac-centric shops may find that a reasonable price.

The only PC content-creation tool that Apple offers is QuickTime Pro. This tool provides only very limited editing capabilities. QuickTime offers no tools comparable with the Microsoft and RealNetworks end-user tools for creating basic slide shows.

To integrate media, we used SMIL 1.0, a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard that is supported in QuickTime 4. We would have liked to stream images directly from the Darwin server, but we had to copy them to a separate Web server and use full URLs to reference them in our SMIL source code. HTTP delivery makes sense, of course, because UDP streaming can result in lost packets. Unlike in audio and video, lost packets in streamed GIF or JPEG images can result in noticeably corrupted images. RealNetworks offers a proprietary solution, called RealPix, for streaming images over UDP from RealServer.

To simulate a live broadcast, we set up a Playlist, a feature designed to let you do things like set up a play list for your own Internet radio station. We manually edited a plain-text play-list configuration file and then created a text file that listed the media files in the Movies directory that would constitute our play list. We then ran the PlayListBroadcaster.exe utility from the command line, feeding the configuration file as a parameter. We got this up and running without too much difficulty; we solved a series of file-path problems we kept running into by copying everything into the Movies directory.

Administering the Darwin server involved manually editing a server configuration file. Monitoring consists of specifying a URL in the server.cfg file to generate a Web page that shows settings and current connections. This is much cruder than the interfaces for administering and monitoring offered by Windows Media Services and RealServer. New versions of QuickTime and the Darwin server that were in public beta during our tests address these shortcomings to some degree, but some manual editing of configuration files to configure splitting, for example, will persist in the new version.

To set up splitting, you again face an exercise in manually editing configuration files. To test this, we relayed (the QuickTime terminology for split) our simulated live broadcast (the play list) to our second Darwin Streaming Server. We edited the appropriate CFG files as documented using Wordpad, but we couldn't get the broadcast working. After a very long phone call with a nice person at Apple who specializes in the streaming-server technology, we got it up and running. We didn't know the Session Description Protocol file also had to be hand-edited and transferred to our target splitter. The same drill is required every time you want to enable a new splitting stream source.

In our PC-centric test environment, QuickTime on Darwin was only adequate as a streaming platform. However, QuickTime is a powerful authoring environment and is the platform of choice for most media professionals who work on Macs. Check out the media types supported in the features chart to get a feel for what you can develop on a properly equipped Macintosh. If you already have in-house Macs and QuickTime authoring expertise, this could be a suitable streaming media platform, though you should investigate Apple's QuickTime Streaming Server or RealNetworks' RealSystem Server 8, which supports QuickTime streaming and should be out of beta by the time you read this. If you're in a PC-centric shop that roughly matches our test setup, we recommend you decide between Windows Media and RealNetworks.

QuickTime 4.1.2, free download; QuickTime Pro, $29.99; QuickTime 5 public preview, free download, Apple Computer, (800) MY-APPLE, (408) 996-1010. www.apple.com.

Andy Covell is director of information technology at the Syracuse University School of Management. Send your comments on this article to him at abcovell@som.syr.edu.