Placing All Media on the Net

In this brief article, Javed Mostafa observes that we may soon see a dramatic increase in the availability of text, audio, and video on the Internet. In light of the fact that producers want to exercise as much control as possible over costly content, they have - up to now - sharply limited access. However, Mostafa points to increased collaboration between large content producers (e.g., Time-Warner) and search engines (e.g., Google) that will, in time, enable search engines to serve as gateways to all types of content by generating and maintaining indexes, in addition to providing search services for many classes of published media.