Concert to be held in cyberspace

Rock and roll goes high-tech tonight at 10 p.m. The first-ever concert broadcast over the Internet, by the Seattle band Sky Cries Mary, will be available free of charge to anyone with a high-speed connection to the Internet. But University students may not be able to watch the ground-breaking concert, said Mark Litwack, manager of network engineering for Data Communications and Computing Services. "I don't think we're going to be ready for full video and sound for the entire campus," he said. "There's no way we'll be able to guarantee a picture." Litwack said the University's Internet connection, which used to be very slow, was upgraded several months ago to a faster one. Some Internet services, though, have yet to be upgraded to match the new speed. The concert will be broadcast over a system called M-Bone, a multi-media network that runs parallel to the Internet, according to Karen Allen, the band's manager. "We have an M-Bone connection, but the site we get it from is not a very good site," Litwack said. Although the University now has a high speed Internet connection, the computer it still uses to connect to the M-Bone system is not up to the speed the University is capable of achieving, Litwack said. "We're trying to find a better connection for tomorrow," Litwack said last night. But even if a new connection is found, campus-wide access will not be possible, he added. "The only [M-Bone] tools I've seen have been for Unix," he said. Computers in the University's computer labs are either IBM or Macintosh, not Unix systems. Litwack said he does not know of any M-Bone software that runs on these computers. Some computers in facilities associated with the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences or in David Rittenhouse Laboratories may be available for viewing the concert, Litwack said. He did not know last night whether or not students could actually watch the show using these computers. Ironically, the concert was originally scheduled to be broadcast over the Internet from the University, when Sky Cries Mary plays a free show in the Hall of Flags in Houston Hall on November 22 at 1 p.m. "We needed to be at a university, we had an extra day, and we figured, hey, why not," said Allen, in a telephone interview from Firstars Management in Seattle. "They wanted to give something back to the college kids." But, Allen said, those plans fell through at the last minute. "We didn't get a 'no' from Penn until last week," she said. According to Ben Morgan, the Social Planning and Events Committee assistant director for concerts, the University only had to let the band use the school's high-speed Internet connection. "If the school had agreed, all they had to to was lend the lines, and Sky Cries Mary would have provided cameras and computers," the College sophomore said. George McKenna, the director of Network Planning and Services for DCCS, said, however, that using the University's connection to provide real-time video and sound would have interfered with use of the Internet by students for e-mail and other services. "It seemed inappropriate to allocate bandwidth to something which would interfere with academic services," he said. The University, McKenna said, can only send and receive a certain amount of information over the Internet at one time. Using M-Bone to broadcast internationally would have taken up most of the allocated bandwidth. Everett Thompson, the director of college promotions at World Domination Records, the band's label, said Sky Cries Mary hopes to gain attention from tonight's broadcast. "Being able to reach as many people as possible is the main goal," he said. "Just the exposure is beautiful." But Charles Como, Los Angeles manager of the Internet Underground Music Archive, which will handle the technical aspects of the broadcast, said there is more than just record sales at stake tonight. "The reason we're doing this is to make the public aware of what the Internet can do," he said. "If you can watch live video broadcast over the Net, then what's next?"

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