Sky Station estimates that it would cost $800m (pounds 500m) to construct 250 platforms around the world, each of which could support 600,000 channels.At present, though, satellite information can travel in one direction only (it is possible for every home to have a satellite dish, but not a transmitter). The firm intends to attach communications equipment to the floats. Because the new platforms will be much closer to Earth than current satellites, which orbit at around 22,500 miles, a computer would need far less power to communicate with them, creating the posibility of a satellite-borne Internet. Companies are now investigating the possibility of sending Internet data not by cable but by radio waves, in a manner akin to mobile phones. A more exciting possibility, though, is the use of satellites.The US Federal Communications Commission has recently given its permission for a new company, Sky Stations International, to launch hydrogen-filled floats and suspend them 100,000ft (19 miles) above the Earth's surface. But travelling by air, as with TV or radio broadcast, weight of traffic is not an issue."A number of new developments could make the air metaphor even more apt.

The amount of data that can travel on the Internet is constrained by the bandwidth of the telephone lines, restricting access to any particular Internet site, especially for data-intensive media such as video. Current technology cannot deliver audio or video streaming to more than 1,000 people at the same time, and therefore rules out the possibility of a simultaneous mass audience for a service like Channel Cyberia.As Teare puts it, the difference between Internet and conventional broadcast technology is "like the difference between travelling from London to Glasgow by air or by road. If you go by road, the time you arrive will depend on the weight of traffic On the Internet, too, weight of traffic is the key variable. Such developments could bring the World Wide Web alive, bridging the gap between CD-ROM and Internet.

They may create the possibility of true multimedia interactivity over the Net in the not too distant future.Even with active streaming, though, it would still be difficult to show live video on the Net. The problem facing software developers is that video on the Internet has to go through a process known as compression. Every second of video can take up to five seconds to compress, making it almost impossible to be displayed live. The possibility of live streaming exists, but the development remains a few years away.The next-generation technology may also provide the answer to another major limitation of today's Internet - restrictions on the number of people who can simultaneously access information from a particular site.

Shockwave is expected to introduce real-time video streaming later this year, allowing a viewer to watch a video as the file downloads.At the Professional Developers Conference in San Francisco recently, Netscape's rival Microsoft unveiled plans for its Active X system which also allows real-time video and audio (as well as 3D virtual reality) to be accessed from a Web site. Why? Because they were stunned that anything at all came out of the box. It's the same with the Internet." The next generation of Internet technology will transform all this, he argues, and take us into the "colour" era.Already Java (the hottest Internet programming language of the moment) and Shockwave (a popular plug-in for Netscape's browser) have helped create more dynamic Web pages. In those days, people would sit and watch the box in the corner of the room for hours, despite poor pictures and terrible programmes.