As yet, the majority of online content on the internet is text-based, despite its potential to handle rich media types such as animation, audio, video and 3D graphics. However, recent research from market analysts, Forrester Research, shows that investment in multimedia online content is increasing as the technology evolves. Forrester interviewed 50 new media managers, currently in the process of deploying multimedia content on their company’s web sites, and found that 80% of the interviewees are using more than one multimedia feature on their sites. The main objective for deploying this technology, according to 80% of respondents, was to create a more compelling site. Other reasons cited were to effectively convey information (30%), to accurately depict a product (24%), to lengthen user’s visits to the site (10%), and to improve customer service (2%). Respondents reported seeing real benefits from their efforts, such as increased site traffic (64%), longer visits (38%), increased media exposure (18%), and increased sales/responses (16%). However, managing multimedia content still poses some tough challenges, especially the issue of bandwidth availability. Other issues included content creation and production (40%), updating content (24%), and maintaining content for multiple browsers (16%). Despite the significant barriers to the uptake of multimedia content, Forrester forecasts that, in the next two years, the adoption of multimedia-friendly clients, the emergence of new generation of development tools and more complete server offerings, and gradual improvements in band-width should all contribute to extending the use of multimedia content.
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