Last weekend, all the promise and all the limitations of the Web were made clear by Obi-Wan Kenobi.
If you are a rabid Star Wars fan and an Internet user, you are probably already aware that a new, second trailer for the hotly-anticipated new "prequel" Stars Wars film, Episode 1: The Phantom Men- ace, was released on to the Web for downloading last week. That meant you could get it on the Internet before the trailer's bigscreen, theatre debut.
The first trailer for the film, which came out before Christmas, was so popular in the US that people were going to theatres just to see it.
Bizarrely, they would buy tickets for movies that they did not stay in the theatre to see - they would just watch the trailer and leave.
Someone involved with the Star Wars publicity machine got the smart idea of placing the trailer onto the Internet as well, in the popular Quicktime Web video format. Webgoers flocked to the official Star Wars site - www.starwars.com - to get a copy of the trailer for themselves, or maybe to avoid paying for all those film tickets.
Now, Lucasfilms has a second trailer out, which they quietly put onto the Web too. But of course, in the usual communal, gossipy way of the Web, word quickly got around. Like many of my women friends, I've been a Star Wars fan since I struggled with youthful indecision over whom to fancy most - that bland prettyboy Luke Skywalker or hunky rogue, Han Solo. This time round, it's Ewan McGregor as a young Obi-Wan Kenobi. In the interests of research, I headed over to the site to check it out.
That's the point at which I realised once again - and with a good deal of exasperation - that any kind of mass-market, commercially viable Internet experience is so near, yet so far.
Certainly, the Star Wars site proves how powerful the Web can be as a marketing tool complementing other, traditional techniques for reaching an audience. Print, film, television and radio each has its place in creating and supporting interest in a new film, but only the Web can offer the strengths of all those formats combined. And, the Web offers something absolutely unique: the ability for the individual consumer to interact with whatever content a film's supporters wish to make available.
In the case of The Phantom Menace, that means website visitors can download trailers, view stills from the film, read a plot synopsis, find out about the production process, learn about individual characters and the major actors, buy merchandise and link to sites which detail the other films in the Star Wars stable.
At a fraction of the cost of a mass advertising campaign, the website thus both fuels and satisfies curiosity about the upcoming film, while reaching millions of people. Visitors get a personalised experience that other media cannot equal, because they can choose whatever material is of most interest.
Information about the film can be fed out at intervals, ensuring that visitors return for updates on the film's production or new features on its computer special effects, sound design, or "animatics" (the odd creatures created for the film which exist in metal and moulded latex rather than as a figment of a computer's imagination).
So far, so good. The problem comes when visitors go for the tastiest and, unfortunately, biggest treats on the site, the trailers. Whatever way you look at it, the new trailer is a plump little morsel, with the smallest version (with the lowest resolution and mono sound) weighing in at 11 MB. The largest version, which I chose to download, waddles along at a whopping 25 MB.
Sadly, there is no instant gratification here. On a good, fast Internet connection with a typical 28k modem, on a Sunday morning when the Web is relatively quiet as only the earliest-riser Yanks are online, it still took me two hours to download the 25 MB trailer. There was no point in waiting around - I actually left the house, and returned to find the trailer on my computer desktop and ready to go.
Or so I thought. To my surprise, my new laptop didn't have the required Apple Quicktime application pre-loaded on it, not even with the pre-installed Internet Explorer browser. So once again I had to log on and this time, fetch Quicktime for Windows 95 from Apple's site - which took close to 45 minutes. All in all, that's nearly three hours of fussing about to get two minutes and 30 seconds of film. And that is delivered in a little, tiny window, about the size of a credit card. R2D2 and Jabba the Hut (yes, they'll be back) end up smaller than a postage stamp.
It's tedious and infuriating to interact with the Web in this way, and there's no quick fix coming, either. We're on technological hold at the moment, waiting for the massive upgrades in telecommunications networks and the advances in networking technologies which will make true, "real-time" interaction with the Net possible.
In other words, the delays which cropped up in between the moment I decided I was interested in seeing the trailer, and the point several hours later when I finally got to watch it, are the problems which bigger bandwidth will resolve.
If bandwidth has seemed too abstract a concept in the past, here's a practical way of thinking about it. Fatter "pipes", the metaphor used to describe the capacity of the digital channel through which information can be delivered, will enable applications like Quicktime, and content like the Star Wars trailer, to arrive in milliseconds rather than hours. Video will be delivered in full-screen glory rather than as a bite-sized miniature. And of course, bigger bandwidth will transform the ways in which business uses the Web.
Until then, computer users will have to make do with viewing a tiny, albeit feisty, Ewan McGregor as the youthful Obi-Wan Kenobi. Oh, and yes, the download is worth the wait.
Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish-times.ie
