The following are encapsulations of some of today's top local stories. Subsequently, the company upgraded its distribution systems to bypass some of the Internet's many choke points. Capacity improved tenfold. Last May's Webcast was much smoother.
Difficulties remain even as computers get more powerful and more households get high-speed lines.
As the demand for sight and sound explodes, entire businesses, such as iBeam Broadcasting Corp. in Sunnyvale and Akamai Technologies Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., have formed around tweaking Internet performance. IBeam's production facilities in Silicon Valley look like a cross between a traditional broadcast studio and a network operating center. The blend reflects iBeam's goals of layering a broadcast-style network over an Internet built for other things. The thing great about it for distributing Web pages is the thing not great about it for distributing video. After all, the Internet wasn't built for the direct transmission of data but rather as a way for data to reach destinations in the event a nuclear attack knocked out several major U.S. cities.