From today's Forbes: It's a long shot, but a talk show might be more compelling when it moves from the radio to a PC. Webcasting By Nikhil Hutheesing KENNETH WILLIAMS netted $150 million in stock from the $1 billion sale of his computer game company, Sierra Online, to Cendant Corp. in 1996. A year later he retired, after wisely selling the Cendant shares, planning an oceanfront estate in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico and a 62-foot Nordhaven yacht to go with it. Then he got bored. "The house is impractical, and the boat is a paperweight," he complains. Instead, Williams, 44, decided to start another company, this one to provide interactive talk shows on the Web. Is this what digital convergence is all about? Maybe. The intersection of broadcasting and computer technology was supposed to create huge new opportunities for profit, and big companies like Time Warner have dissipated tidy sums trying to find them. But the earliest success stories may come from modest endeavors like Williams'. Williams figured that the proper model was neither video on demand nor sports nor hard news, but rather talk radio. He got the idea when his wife, Roberta, asked him to find a way to funnel Seattle talk shows to their future home in Mexico. Williams hooked up with Jarold Bowerman, who had run marketing and product development at Sierra Online, and in November 1997 they founded Worldstream Communications in Bellevue, Wash. Williams invested $3 million; Bowerman added $100,000. Williams hired six technical people and lured James Golden away from his job as producer of Rush Limbaugh's radio talk show. Worldstream Communications' Web site (www.talkspot.com) offers shows on 3 channels; Williams expects to offer 100 shows by the end of the year. The topics range from news and politics to sex (an economic engine of every new medium since Gutenberg's day). In a typical show the host interviews a guest to the accompaniment of video and still photographs. You get the audio over your computer's speakers (as long as you have a recent browser); on your screen you get the video plus text-based discussion between the host, guests and the audience. The discussion can change the course of the programming. Example: A newscast on the recent U.S. attacks on Iraq might send the audience off on the tangent of high-tech bombs. This flexible format requires the host and the producers to react, say, by quickly pulling up a picture of a smart bomb. It's not enough to find such a picture in an instant; you must also be able to speed it to the viewers. Worldstream tries to get around the chronic logjam on the Internet by anticipating where the discussion is going, calling up the right images and sending them to your computer's memory before they're needed. That way the producer can unveil them instantly when the time is ripe. To make all this happen, Williams wrote some 15,000 lines of software code in Java to compress audio, text and images. Will all that hard work pay off? It won't be easy to lure couch potatoes and advertisers to the Web. "People won't give up TV to watch something on-line," says Daniel King, an analyst with LaSalle St. Securities in Chicago. "That's why ABC doesn't produce television shows exclusively for the Web." Worldstream must also face down broadcast.com, its main webcasting rival. Unlike Worldstream, broadcast.com doesn't try to make its own content, but broadcasts stuff from such companies as ABC and ESPN. Another difference: broadcast.com runs conference calls for investors and corporations. Its revenues jumped 171% in the first half of 1998. Williams expects revenues�mostly from advertising and subscription fees�to hit $2 million in 1999 and rise to $50 million in 2000. "People will run home from work to turn us on," he says. That sounds a mite optimistic to us. But hey, if Williams loses his $3 million investment, he'll still have $147 million left over�and a Mexican estate that will be ready to live in by April.

I tried http://www.talkspot.com and the interface was pretty slick. It's a text chat window with real audio running. Which reminds me, we need to focus in on a good chat system here. We could be doing what they're doing with our live webcam, all we need is the chat.

definately intriguing...

TalkSpot is still around and growing, they have a 10 second signup and then you watch a video.