THEY'VE GOTTA HAVE IT

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

The scene is a Manhattan skyscraper. a computer guy named Rob Glaser is standing at a PC. A projector beams a jumbo image of his screen across an auditorium. As reporters gather to watch, the demo begins. Glaser clicks on an icon and, through a miracle of high-speed compression and decompression, a Counting Crows music video streams from a computer in Seattle onto the screen in New York. It's live video, transmitted over the Internet, and even people using plain old phone lines and standard modems can have it. I thought of those first frames of Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon. The video quality was roughly the same.

Oh, but that's a cheap shot. RealVideo, as the new software is called, will improve. It's been a lifelong dream for Glaser to create the perfect communications medium, and now he may be close. RealVideo might just, as Glaser claims, help "turn the Internet into the next great mass medium."

On-the-fly Net video, it should be noted, is something that other companies have already demonstrated. But my bet is that Glaser will be the one to popularize it and make it work. That's because Glaser, 35, has been preparing for this moment since he was eight. He joined the computer revolution in third grade, when a teacher tried to keep the young math whiz quiet by marching him off to program a hulking mainframe. In high school, he and his pals jury-rigged a low-powered radio station that skirted fcc rules and broadcast student news and sports programs to the classrooms. In 1983 Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen lured the Yale grad to Redmond, Washington, where Glaser quickly ascended to the company's topmost ranks, just under Bill Gates.

But after a decade, Glaser quit, a millionaire yearning for his activist past. "I wanted to put up my periscope and regain some perspective on the world," he says. You see, if Gates was Glaser's business role model, Cesar Chavez was his muse. A grape boycotter from way back, Glaser wrote a college-newspaper column called "What's Left" and has always been passionate about bottom-up grass-roots movements. Money, as far as Glaser is concerned, can be damned. "I'm not interested in the purely economic end of this anymore than Pavarotti is interested in getting paid to sing," he says.

He called his new company, appropriately enough, Progressive Networks, and launched his first product, RealAudio, two years ago. Given away for free, it became the de facto standard for sound on the Net and is used by some 10 million people. RealVideo is poised to succeed it. Within a day of its release last week, more than 100,000 copies were downloaded from www.real.com

Already such top-down TV powerhouses as MSNBC and ABC Online are testing it. C-SPAN is "Webcasting" gavel-to-gavel congressional coverage. Fox TV is using it for a two-week Net trial of its 24-hour news program.

To inspire the more independent, creative types, however, Glaser paid RealMilk pitchman and film auteur Spike Lee to make three five-minute online "films." "Before this technology came into play, there was always a question about whose work would get seen and whose wouldn't," said Lee during the press demo. The Pavarotti of the Net looked on and beamed.

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