Business Multimedia Explained:

With numeric and text information (units such as a message, customer number, credit card transaction, airline reservation, or electronic mail message), the number of bits amount to a few hundreds up to a few thousands. Multimedia is very different. Graphic images used in management presentations are coded in just thousands of bits, but high-resolution photos, in millions and full-motion video, in billions. Tricks of the multimedia hardware and software art and trade-offs between quality and storage size and speed of transmission allow you to choose between audio in thousands or millions of bits and video in millions or billions. Multimedia could be redefined as the economics of bits how many can be processed cheaply and quickly. Until the 1990s, the answer was "a few thousand at a time." Now, it's a few million, and many millions and even billions using emerging high speed telecommunications options and fast computers. Multimedia technology is the management of bits lots and lots of them.

A major problem in making sense of multimedia is making sense of these measurements. Consider the following (don't let your eyes glaze over - I offer a way to make the figures much more meaningful just a few pages from now):

• A page of printed text in a business book is typically equivalent to 3,000 bytes. Although this obviously varies according to page and font size, it's a reliable general estimate. A spreadsheet that takes up 750,000 bytes of data is a very large file for a PC application; it would be something like 1,000 rows and 100 columns in size. An entire 300-page book occupies under 1 million bytes. A straightforward management presentation with 30 color slides, enough for around two hours of nonstop lecturing, requires about 100,000 bytes, unless it incorporates images, in which case each slide may take up 1 million bytes.
  
  
• Software programs and operating systems typically consume 2 to 40 million bytes. Microsoft Excel spreadsheet application, for instance, takes 5 MB. The programs for Corel Draw, a multimedia package, occupy over 30 MB. The Windows 95 operating system requires 40 to 60 MB.
  
  
• A 15-minute video, which uses only half the available PC display screen and runs at half the speed of full-motion TV-quality transmission: 300 MB (300 million bytes).
  
  
• Full-screen, full-motion video: 3 GB (gigabytes, or billions of bytes). Showing the movie requires a transmission speed of at least 3 mbps (million bits per second).
  
  
• A professional-quality photograph: 2.4 mb (million bits).
  
  
• A full-page magazine ad from a high-quality color image: 7.2 MB (million bytes).
  
  
• An image of what is displayed on a typical laptop computer color screen: 300 KB (thousand bytes).

This isn't just an issue of size. It obviously takes longer to move a single 2.4-MB photo from disk storage to computer memory, or from a CD-ROM or a scanner that makes a digital image of it, than to move a 20-KB (thousands of bytes) spreadsheet. A standard CD-ROM drive moves data at 600,000 bits per second. That means that moving 4 million bytes takes almost a minute.

All this is accurate, but not very meaningful for managers - it's data to them, not information, and it doesn't help them build knowledge of multimedia. What makes things even more difficult is that there is no common base of measurement. Telecommunications speeds are measured in bits per second, but the files transmitted are measured in bytes. A thousand bits or kilobits is 1,000, but a kilobyte is 1,024 (because bytes are measured in powers of 2 - 2^8 is 256, and 1,024 is 2^10). The sequence of size and speed goes from single units of bits/bytes; to thousands, or kilobits/bytes, shown as kb and Kb; to millions, shown as megabits/bytes (mb and MB) and billions (gb and Gb). Subsets of these may be shown in decimals, so that 14,800 bps is 14,800 bits per second. However, it is more likely to be shown as 14.8 kb. Common units of telecommunications speeds are 9.6 kb, 14.4 kb, 28.8 kb, 64 kb, 128 kb, 1.54 mb, 45 mb, and 2.4 gb. Of course, for videoconferencing, you need 384 kb.

Multimedia is fundamentally about the management and transmission of bits and the storage of bytes. As these examples show, there are huge variations in the ranges of each for different media. Those differences are the key issue in the choice and capabilities of hardware and software. The problem is that the figures often mean very little to managers. The sheer scale makes them rather like units of measurement for astronomical distance. Light travels 186,000 miles per second. That's something we can at least relate to. But how about 11,160,000, 669,600,000 or 16,070,400,000? They are the distances light travels in a minute, an hour, and a day. A light year is about 6 trillion miles. If you know that a star is 120 light years away, you have at least a sense of what that means. When I add that another is just 60 light years away, you understand the difference.

In this guide, I've created my own equivalents of light minutes, hours, and days. Instead of translating the units of information technology measurement into time equivalents, I use printed page, book, and movie equivalents to make the scales more meaningful. My approximations are based on a book's being 300 pages long, with each page having 30 to 40 lines of print and 70 characters per line. A movie is two hours long. Obviously, these are not exact measurements, but they give a reasonable sense of relative speed and size, which is what managers need. Because I want this book to be accurate about the technology, I add the exact figures in parentheses. So, for instance, I recast the figures shown earlier in terms of:

I've rounded the figures up and down to make them correspond to units that result in the most comprehensible relative scales. For instance, I could have chosen 24,000 bits as a printed page equivalent, but 25,000 divides more tidily into such units as 1 million (40 page equivalents). I chose 7.5 million bits and 1 million bytes as the measure of a book and 25 billion bits and 3 billion bytes as that of a film, so that all my figures have a common denominator of 3 and 5 and are also fairly easy for you to remember. 

Using these measures, here's how I present multimedia telecommunications speeds and storage requirements, rephrasing the examples given earlier:

• A spreadsheet takes up 250 printed pages (750 KB) of data.
  
  
• A straightforward management presentation with 30 color slides requires about 30 printed pages (90 KB).
  
  
• Software programs and operating systems occupy around 3 to 10 printed books (3 to 10 MB).
  
  
• A 15-minute video: 300 printed books (300 MB).
  
  
• Full-screen, full-motion video: 120 printed pages per second (3 mbps).
  
  
• A professional-quality photograph: 2 1/2 printed book equivalents (2.4 MB).
  
  
• A-full page magazine ad from a high-quality color image: 1 printed book (7.2 MB).
  
  
• An image of what is displayed on a typical laptop computer color screen: 12 printed pages (300 KB).

I'm not entirely comfortable converting the exactitude of technology to these approximations; it's a little like describing the speed limit as "50 miles per hourish but 70-plus is fine on major highways" or specifying a person's "normal" temperature as "in the 90 to 100-degree range." It is, after all, the precise figures that determine the many technology choices and trade-offs. But to allow managers to make technology decisions without becoming overwhelmed by measurements of bits and bytes, I use page and book equivalents, with exact numbers of bits and bytes in parentheses.