AOL Gets the Green Light to Stream Video

Big Deal?
Yes, in fact, this decision is a big deal for proponents of video communications for a number of reasons. First, instant messaging is a widespread form of communication well suited to meet the broadband-connected user conditions friendly to video. IDC forecasts that in 2002 there were more than 195 million consumer instant messaging accounts, and they expect this market to grow to nearly 290 million in 2005. The number of people capable of launching a live stream with one click from within their IM client will virtually double or triple (depending on whose numbers you believe) when AOL releases a video-ready IM application.

At the fifty thousand foot view, there are two categories of IM: the public or consumer targeted services (provided free to the public by the owners of IP networks such as AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo!) and private servers (provided only to those whom the host wants to offer the service: employees, members of an organization, or paid subscribers). While the enterprise IM accounts are significantly fewer than consumer, everyone agrees that IM technologies are going to help accelerate business productivity.

An IM buddy list is essentially a directory for initiating on-line communication with others. The buddy list reflects the "state" of the individuals who have given one another permission to be added to their respective buddy lists. For the vast majority of IM users, text is the media by which they communicate with "buddies" but for users of Yahoo! and MSN instant messaging services, the buddy list can also be a convenient place from which to launch a streaming video session.

In June 2001, as a result of a collaborative development project with webcam market leader, Logitech, Yahoo! was the first to release to its subscribers (recently estimated to number 10.5M) the software necessary for video IM. Microsoft MSN recently followed suit when it started offering a Webcam video streaming feature within the MSN Messenger 6.0 version of its software last month. From the "I want to…" menu, the user can select start a video stream. While Microsoft won't release usage numbers, Logitech, which also developed the software that is currently included in MSN 6.0 and now hosts the video sessions generated by MSN users on a parallel network, reports that video traffic has "soared."

Although the release of MSN 6.0 with streaming video may have been a factor in the commission’s decision, the competitive landscape is not the only condition that has changed. The Commission is now dominated by republicans who, in general, would like to see fewer federal restrictions on how companies do business.