Have you noticed when you link to a graphic or sound from places like Tripod, Geocities, Angelfire, or any of the free web page hosts on the internet, that your graphic or sound no longer works ? This is because many (if not all) of the free web page hosts are now blocking remote linking to images and sounds. Why are they doing this ? It's due to the cost of bandwidth, remote linking uses a lot of extra bandwidth ! Millions of dollars in bandwidth is lost each year due to people linking to graphics and sounds from other web page hosts. The free web page host just can't afford to do this any longer and still provide a free service for all on the internet. Also many privately owned dot coms are blocking remote linking because of the bandwidth it uses up, they just can't afford this extra cost in bandwidth usage.

A remote link is when you create a link to an image or sound, for your web site, from a server other than where your web site is located. Or when you create a link to a image or sound in a Webtv email signature. You can avoid remote linking to an image or sound on your web sites by uploading these files to your own web page account. Once the images and sounds are in your own site's files, then you can use them in your web site without creating a remote link off another server.

So that is fine for web pages but what about Webtv email signatures ? Well, this is a problem, Webtv Networks does not provide storage space for it's users to store images and sounds for use in Webtv email signatures. You can however store images (not sounds) in your Webtv scrapbook and use them in your email signatures but doing this is a bit tricky. First you must upload the images to the scrapbook, then place the image onto a web page using the Webtv Page Builder. Once the image is on a web page and published to the internet, the image will then have it's own URL (address). You will have to view the html source of the published web page to see the image URL. You now can use the image URL in your Webtv email signature html code. Sounds in Webtv email signatures are a bigger problem, there is no place to store the sounds to link to for Webtv emails. Some people link to other web sites found on the internet but this only cost the web site owner a lot of extra money in bandwidth charges. Once the site owner receives his/her bill for the month, they too will find a way to block remote loading of their sound files.

So what is the real solution to images and sounds in Webtv emails ? The solution is that Webtv/Microsoft (yes, Webtv is owned by Microsoft) should provide storage space (1 meg ?) for a few images and sounds for Webtv email signatures for it's paying customers, and pay for the bandwidth that these images and sounds will be using. The rest of the internet is tired of supporting images and sounds for Webtv emails and has said "enough" ! I'm sure Microsoft can well afford this for their customers that would like to add a Html signature with images and sounds to his/her email.

Related Link - Direct Linking & Bandwidth Theft