*** Internet
Macromedia Unveils ShockRave
(February 18)
Macromedia, Inc. debuted ShockRave, a free online entertainment
service featuring Shockwave content created by entertainment
companies and developers such as United Media, Columbia TriStar
Interactive, Comedy Central, SegaSoft Networks, Inc.,
Circumstance Design, Zeek Interactive, Ezone and TheDJ.com. From
Dilbert and South Park to King Putt and Lenny Loosejocks,
ShockRavers can choose from over 45 games, puzzles, cartoons and
more. Consumers will find cutting-edge action and arcade-style
entertainment as well as witty animation and mind-bending tests
of concentration. Some of the companies sponsoring ShockRave
include 7 UP, Apple Computer, Inc. and The LifeSavers Company.
Since its introduction in December 1995, Macromedia's Shockwave
technology has brought multimedia to the Internet, transforming
the Web from a static, text-based medium into a dynamic,
interactive experience. Daily downloads of the Shockwave
multimedia player have continued to grow sharply to 125,000 a
day, totaling more than 37 million downloads worldwide to date.
As of February 1998, Macromedia's Web site is the 18th most
heavily trafficked site on the Internet according to the Hot 100
www.macromedia.com/
www.shockrave.com/
Is the Web's free ride over? This question explored by
Inter@ctive Week Online
(February 18)
Business Week and a handful of other companies that are aiming
to covert to a paid subscription format on the Web are charting
new territory in Web publishing. For instance, Microsoft Corp.'s
Slate magazine announced pricing for its move to a subscription
service. The 20-month-old magazine will charge $29.95 for an
annual subscription to its service - $19.95 for readers who sign
up early.
Marvel Comics said it was converting its Web offering to a paid
subscription. Marvel will offer monthly subscriptions of $3.95
per month; $34.95 per year, but will be free to America Online
Inc. (AOL) members.
While some brands such as The Wall Street Journal Interactive,
already have made the conversion to paid subscriptions on the
Web, the moves by the likes of Slate and Marvel illustrate a new
round of experimentation that will test just how willing online
viewers are to pay for new tiers of Web content.
Some industry watchers remain unconvinced of the viability of
paid subscriptions online, because of the variety of options
easily available to readers for free. "Selling subscriptions
with no free access whatsoever is a very difficult proposition
for all but the most unshakable brands," said Mark Mooradian, an
analyst at Jupiter Communications LLP.
But magazines such as Microsoft's Slate see no alternative. Even
though the site attracted 270,000 unique visitors last month,
compared with just 140,000 in November 1997, the magazine cannot
survive on advertising alone, said Rogers Weed, Slate's
publisher.
"Nothing that I have seen in the past one-and-a-half years has
dissuaded me from the notion that we need subscriptions to have
a viable business model," Weed said. The magazine will put up
its subscription walls on March 9.
"The longer you stay a free site, the harder it becomes to
switch to paid," Weed said. "For us, it's not question of if,
but when."
While Slate is putting the bulk of its magazine behind its
subscription wall, it will continue to offer selected features,
such as its popular "Today's Papers" offering for free at the
Web entrance to its magazine.
Business Week, likewise, will offer some limited daily features
for free at its Web site. But its conversion to paid is about
more than simply generating subscription dollars online.
Instead, Business Week's new approach casts its online offering
mostly as an added benefit to being a subscriber to the print
magazine.
Each of the publication's 1 million paying subscribers will be
given access to the Web site. The magazine also plans to charge
$39.95 for an annual subscription to the Web site alone and just
$3 more for a combined subscription to the Web and print
versions of the magazine – a pricing plan designed to encourage
usage of both, Smith said.
"We're looking increasingly at the Web as a complementary
product," he said. "It's not all about print, and it's not all
about the Web," Smith said. "It's about delivering content in
its proper medium, and, as time goes on, you'll see more and
more melding of the two."
www.zdnet.com/intweek
Keynote Systems Announces Internet Performance Results
for January and February
(March 11)
During the first two months of 1998, overall Internet
performance was 60% faster than during the comparable period of
1997 according to measurements announced by Keynote Systems, the
recognized authority on Internet performance.
Despite this dramatic improvement over the previous year,
overall Internet performance the first two weeks of February
1998 degraded 20% from January's levels, primarily due to
outages at the MAE-West Network Access Point (NAP) and major
backbone providers.
These performance results are based on 180,000 measurements
conducted each week for the Keynote Business 40 Internet
Performance Index, a standard index of the overall health and
performance of the Internet that measures the time required to
access and download pages from 40 important business World Wide
Web sites. A graph depicting Internet performance over the past
year can be found on Keynote's web site at
www.keynote.com/measures/business/business40.html.
Four of the eight weeks in January and February saw major
Internet outages, three of which involved problems at the MAE-
East and MAE-West NAPs. Two of these outages seriously degraded
overall Internet performance early in February, with performance
averages of 26.41 seconds in the first week of the month and
26.53 in the second week compared to average performance between
21 and 22 seconds for each week of January. Performance worsened
somewhat the third week as problems in the west-coast network of
GTE/BBN degraded performance for many users attempting to access
web sites on that backbone.
After the outages of early February, the month settled down and
weekly performance returned to the 21-second range measured the
previous month. January's performance was 13% slower than the
last week of December as Internet use increased after the
Christmas and New Year's holidays. Thursday, Jan. 22, was a
particularly bad performance day for the web sites of USA Today,
The New York Times, and CNNfn, owing to increased Internet
traffic and congestion by users at work seeking up-to-the-minute
news about the evolving White House sex scandal that was
announced the previous day.
Table of Weekly and Monthly Average Performance
1998 1997
January week 1 22.09 36.05
week 2 21.09 37.67
week 3 21.00 32.88
week 4 21.59 34.10
average 21.44 35.17
February week 1 26.41 45.83
week 2 26.53 40.90
week 3 23.45 46.29
week 4 21.19 38.56
average 24.39 42.89
The fastest metropolitan areas from which to access the Internet
-- often four times faster than the slowest ones -- were
Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Boston. The slowest metro
areas included Minneapolis/St. Paul; Dallas/Ft. Worth;
Washington, D.C.; Tampa; San Diego; and Columbus. The
significant variation in performance by users' geographic
locations illustrates the performance differences among backbone
providers, Internet technologies, routing and traffic patterns.
The Keynote Business 40 Internet Performance Index reflects
overall Internet performance by measuring the average response
time experienced by users in 27 metropolitan areas around the
United States accessing standard web content from a mix of 40
important business World Wide Web sites during the peak business
hours of 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time, Monday through
Friday.
To gather data for the Index, Keynote Systems uses its Keynote
Perspective service to measure how long it takes to access and
download a web page via industry-standard HTTP (HyperText
Transfer Protocol), the same protocol used by the Microsoft and
Netscape web browsers, every 15 minutes around the clock from
each of the 40 web sites included in the Index.
Although Keynote has 48 measurement locations around the world,
the Index is calculated only from the measurements taken by the
38 software measurement agents located in 27 major metropolitan
areas around the United States. This produces over 180,000
performance measurements each week for the Index.
www.keynote.com
Wave Issue 9810 4/20/98 Article 3-01