Hype comes in a variety of flavours, not all of them multimedia. Take your pick. Cascading Style Sheets were a good idea that got burned by hype. Now they're making a very cautious comeback. Safe CSS is all you want just now.
Portals are worth bilions, yet they're so easy to make.
Some people will tell you sound on the Web is this year's Next Big Thing. After all, audio files are a lot smaller than video files. Warring browser giants have made seamless audio almost impossible. These days Java's defenders talk about it not as an operating system or even an enabler of desktop applications, but as a technology running on Web servers. ActiveX just never quite made it into mainstream Web use - held back, no doubt, by its inability to do anything at all for those many users of the Netscape browser family.