OK, we all know that video on the web has it's own set of hand-cuffs. Bandwidth limitations are a fact of life on the information highway. But there are alternatives, if you've got enough imagination.

I knew that real, web-based entertainment was overdue, but I wouldn't have believed it unless I had seen it -- at least not this soon. And this isn't some kind of futureware promise, this is here and now; and it's even earning some promising advertising dollars in some very innovative ways.

The name of this game is "You Don't Know Jack, the netshow,". It's produced by the folks who brought you the flying toaster screen saver, After Dark. Their name is Berkeley Systems. Although for this production, they've also brought in a Chicago-based creative team called Jellyvision who writes the jokes and provides the voices. It's also probably worth noting that Berkeley Systems was recently acquired by CUC International's, CUC Software division which has also acquired the on-line gaming pioneer, Sierra On-line, the number one educational software company, Davidson & Associates, and edutainment leader Knowledge Adventure, among others.

Although I'm sure that CUC liked the fact that "You Don't Know Jack" is also a series of hit CD-ROM games ("You Don't Know Jack, Sports," "You Don't Know Jack, Movies," etc.); you're reading The Video Web column, so that's not why I bring this up. And even though I'm not much of a game player, I really found this game to be fun. It's funny, fully interactive and clever. It's kind of a hip game show on steroids with enough sarcasm to prove that it will never take itself too seriously. I even got my wife into it, at least for a little while.

INNOVATIONS
Putting the subjective, creative kudos aside, there are really three major accomplishments that Berkeley Systems has achieved in the process creating a new form of on-line entertainment -- which, of course, is a major accomplishment in itself.

First, they have created a full screen animation and sound presentation on the web at dial-up speeds that delivers what multimedia developers like to call an "immersive experience." There is literally NO "click and wait" once you are into the game, and they use the whole screen (just like video producers). How revolutionary! Second, they've got quite good quality audio that's actually synched to the animated visuals. And finally, they've created an entertainment form that's engaging enough to carry full-screen, TV-style commercials (albeit with no video); thus delivering the kind of intrusion that advertisers appreciate. There's no question, this is something the web has never seen before.

And what's really (in the web vernacular) "cool" is that the game moves along so quickly that the commercial breaks are actually an enjoyable breather. Advertisers include 7UP, 20th Century Fox, Apple, Yahoo and Hugo Boss who are paying roughly $14,000 for a flight of 100,000 five to seven-second exposures of full screen animated graphics and sync sound. The user benefit is that the game is free. Berkeley Systems claims 500,000 players in their first four months which has lead to the launch of "You Don't Know Jack Sports, the netshow" and a soon to be released on-line, animated word game called "Acrophobia."

I had the pleasure of speaking to "the Father of the Flying Toasters," Dr. Jack Eastman, Berkeley Systems Chief Technology Officer about the technology behind these innovations. And, apparently, there is a link to the screen saver business.

Here's the techno scoop: In the process of creating After Dark, Berkeley Systems developed a tool that uses Macromedia Director for two-dimensional animation choreography and then extracts the spatial data to create scripts for the animated behaviors. Given that "You Don't Know Jack" makes extensive use of text graphics, I figured they were using vectors to save bandwidth; but I was wrong. Dr. Jack (no relation to "You Don't Know...") explained that "You Don't Know Jack" uses sprite graphics that are then encoded and highly compressed into a proprietary format that is addressed by a very fast playback engine that operates on client/game player side. No browser is involved once you start playing.

All of this "action" is built into Berkeley Systems' own streaming audio/animation engine that does what Dr. Eastman called "super-streaming." Unlike the web's audio and video streaming engine, Berkeley Systems loads far more than a few seconds of material into your "buffer" before you need them. For example, while you are selecting a subject (in the Jeopardy-like structure), a full set of questions are being downloaded. And if there's available bandwidth while you think things over, they download "generics" such as seven different rude ways to tell you that you got the wrong answer. Of course, all of this is transparent to the user.

To play the game, you need to take a 3MB download (about 20 minutes with a 28.8 modem). Once you've got this engine installed and click "Play Now" on the web site, there's about a 60-second scripted "warm up" (with appropriate pre-show shucking, jiving and background downloading) including a TV director-like "OK, lose the desktop," and then, from then on, it's all real time interactivity including keyboard buzzers ala Jeopardy and Questions with their own theme songs. I promise you it's enough fun to make the download worthwhile.

Beyond all of this proprietary technology, Dr. Jack told me that they licensed off-the-on-line-shelf codecs for audio compression. And, I think you can count on the fact that these folks did their homework in making their selections. For the voice-over, they use a speech codec called TrueSpeech from DSP Group -- the 6.3kbps version, not the 8.5kbps version that comes with Windows. Dr. Jack says the 6.3 version is "tighter" even though it takes longer to compress. For the short music clips in the show, they use Xing Technologies MPEG audio codec.

A WINDOW OPENS ON THE FUTURE
Sure, there are short-comings. For example, the how-to-play instructions could be a bit clearer; but this is by far the most video-like entertainment that I've seen anywhere on the Web. More importantly, it demonstrates that with enough technological and creative imagination, the Web's limited bandwidth can be overcome to deliver compelling new forms of entertainment that go outside the established boundaries.

While You Don't Know Jack's proprietary super-streaming engine is the exclusive property of Berkeley Systems and their new parent, technologies like Macromedia's Flash (which is a vector-based web animation production tool) and streaming media environments like Progressive Network's Real Media Architecture (just to name two) promise to offer more kinds of multi-stream, synchronized multimedia production to the rest of us.

Which brings me back to a familiar question: What kinds of communications are we going to create with these new tools?

Next month, I'll report on some innovative students at UC Berkeley who have taken some innovative steps of their own. Until then, stay tuned and enjoy.