From author Jack Kerouac to campaign finance reformer Granny D, cross-country travel has served ambitions of many stripes,
Joining that tradition this summer will be a crew from Streamedia Productions Inc., a 3-month-old Camp Hill company.
The trip is designed to establish the four-person business in the infant field of live Internet broadcasting, said founder Joel Moll.
Moll hopes to develop vehicles capable of creating live video feeds for broadcast on the Internet, a process known as streaming media.
At a cost of $750,000, a prototype vehicle will make a cross-country publicity tour this summer, starting in Philadelphia in June. They plan to do live feeds as they cruise.
Like most technology startups, Streamedia subsists on high hopes and zero profits. But the company has chosen a field in which the big tech players are willing to write checks.
Streamedia is backed by undisclosed private investors and has attracted interest from iBeam Broadcasting Inc., of Sunnyvale, Calif., a company that is backed by Microsoft Corp., Moll claimed.
Moll's goal is to build the vehicles for less than $100,000 apiece and lease or sell them to anyone desiring a live Internet video feed. A prototype design a sport utility vehicle crammed with equipment and topped by a transmitter.
A larger vehicle, being outfitted by Winemiller Communications Inc., Carlisle, will make the summer tour.
Streamedia's most high-profile work has been on the set of "Hollywood, PA," an independent movie filmed this winter in Central Pennsylvania.
Streamedia helped make possible a daily Internet broadcast of the movie's production.
The work, worth roughly $5,000 to $10,000, was donated, Moll said. But it helped Streamedia find two more unpaid jobs.
Working for free is one of the drawbacks to marketing a new technology, especially a still-evolving, expensive technology.
But expectations are that the Internet will become a "major" part of the $100 billion a year broadcast industry, predicted Lee Hinshaw, an industry consultant with the Tall Tree Group in Greensboro, N.C.
"Right now the web is a two-dimensional, page-oriented world," Hinshaw said.
By replacing slower modems and telephone lines, high-speed broadband connections will speed delivery of audio and video and transform the Internet into a "three dimensional media," he predicted.
Other forms of video transmission are cheaper and more convenient, Hinshaw conceded. But he said that resulted from streaming's novelty and would change as the technology matured.
The hardest part of live Internet video is compressing digital signals for wireless transmission. Streamedia believes it has solved the problem and is seeking a patent for its compression device.
Another obstacle getting data from a wireless source onto the larger, wired Internet.
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