In 1997, Alan Ramadan introduced a new way to watch sports, made possible by the World Wide Web. Throughout the seven-month Whitbread Around the World sailing race, Ramadan's newly formed Quokka Sports (www.quokka.com) broadcast the images and expert commentary that usually accompany sports coverage, but with a twist. Quokka added technical data (some of it in real time) such as navigational notes, boat speed, radio conversations, and e-mail diaries written by the sailing crews. The company mixed it all up and put it on a Web site that drew 1.8 million visitors.
Today, Quokka Sports is no longer an edgy startup with a fistful of venture-capital dollars. Its list of partners includes TCI/Liberty, Hearst, British Telecom and Excite@Home. The site offers a clear glimpse of the future Web. Click on a link for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, and you'll see pages filled with a mélange of pictures, charts, bits of text, and at least one video or audio clip. Quokka also created the RaceViewer, a Shockwave application for motor sports that mixes graphs of the racers' positions with textual commentary and a live video window.
Multimedia-rich Web sites like Quokka's and RealNetworks' Take5 (www.real.com), which gathers an array of audiovisual programming from the Web for users to access in one central location, could be the hottest draws for broadband consumers in the future.
More sites will routinely feature streaming media and 3D modelling. The software to deliver such content already exists. Site designers just need to refine it, and consumers need faster Net connections to view it.
