NEW ORLEANS — RealNetwork's RealPlayer was introduced in 1996. In the same year, AOL marked its third anniversary and Netscape pulled off a spectacular IPO. Online video was limited to the flicker of animated GIF's and an unsteady stream of jerky, moving images. The Internet was growing quickly that year and a consortium of government, academic and private officials began to grasp the scope of this new medium.

Twelve years later, the Internet2 Conference, being held in New Orleans Oct. 13 to 16, will offer a look at what the next version of the Internet will have to offer. Billed as an "invitation to experience pre-commercial Internet technology," Internet2 promises exponential increases in speed, versatility and sheer "gee whiz" innovation.

The original network is now at the core of fundamental, simultaneous revolutions in commerce, economics, education, media and politics. Similarly, the development of the next version of the Internet has implications that are unknown, but very enticing.

Internet2 is essentially a mechanical engineering fix. The primary improvement is the speed at which data is transmitted. Under the hood, however, the way data is funneled through fiber optic networks has been fundamentally changed. By creating dedicated connections between users, very large amounts of data can be transferred quickly — much more quickly — instead of the chaotic, high speed dance of switched digital packets we use today.

One application that could take advantage of this newly fattened bandwidth almost immediately is online video. According to a recently released report by market research firm comScore, over 11.4 billion videos were viewed in July 2008 alone. Internet2 promises to make that volume faster, and in higher definition. One demonstration at the conference will showcase live, uncompressed videoconferencing in true 1080p high definition.

Video is a notorious bandwidth hog with one minute of flash-formatted video requiring 16MB of throughput (216MB for AVI format). With current high-speed cable capacity unrealistically offered at a promised 10MB per second, the buffer between content and capacity to deliver is growing narrower. Attempts at delivering high-definition video rely heavily on compression schemes, software manipulation and large amounts of memory.

The amounts of data required for high-definition video moving at high speed are difficult to gauge. To demonstrate the scope of Internet2's capacity, the consortium of universities and private sector companies behind Internet2 will tackle a very large project. The Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator, is expected to generate multiple terabytes per second. Internet2 will transport streams of data at 10GB per second — the equivalent of 500 hours of digital music per second. And there are multiple 10GB optic lines. The expected daily accumulation requires a noun unfamiliar to most: "petabytes" of data, or roughly 1 million GB.

The new infrastructure is not solely the domain of educators and scientists, however. Corporations are also taking notice. Internet2 lists Warner Bros., Comcast Communications, Qwest Communications, C-Span, Verizon, The Thomson Corporation and others as major participants even at this early stage.

Two formats are emerging for Internet2's capabilities. iHDTV, developed by the University of Washington streams data at rates of up to 1.5 Gb, which is sufficient to transfer uncompressed 1080i high-definition video.

A second format, UltraGrid, primarily developed by the Laboratory of Advanced Networking Technologies at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, also delivers high-definition without compression at approximately the same rate but can be scaled back to perform across existing network capabilities.

Adult's migration to online distribution has the potential to fill at least part of this massive new data river.