AZN's Web site aspires to be a destination and community for adventurous travelers—think Tibet and Tikal rather than Club Med and Disney World. "We are providing a way for travelers to share their experiences online in the form of video, photos, or travelogue experiences," says Marioni, whose spiky hair suggests a recent trip to the 1980s. "We are providing a network platform, so people can produce and premiere their own travel experiences via video." The company will also produce some of its own content.

AZN's quest to become an Internet broadcaster with on-demand travel programming requires the latest in video production technology. The company's bleeding-edge equipment comes largely from Apple: sleek, steely G4 computers, with Final Cut Pro for digital video editing and Mac OS X Server for QuickTime video streaming. AZN also has an iMac DV Special Edition unit running the consumer video-editing application iMovie. Sorenson Vision's Broadcaster and Terran Interactive's Media Cleaner Pro both play significant roles in the production process, along with four well-known Macromedia applications: Dream weaver, Fireworks, Generator, and Flash.

Of course there would be no video without digital video cameras—AZN favors Canon's Elura and its GL-1, equipped with a Samson UHF Series One wireless microphone and receiver.

Marioni cautions that picking the right technology is essential since the wrong choice can haunt a company for a long time. For digital video production, he thinks Macs are the way to go. "I come from a PC and Unix background, " he says. "I had never really worked much on Macs, but they just rock for digital video."

Home Movies

To filter out nausea-inducing shaky-cam home movies, AZN plans to allow users to rate and review the travelogues people submit. But as AZN VP of content Jackie Bennion explains, the core service of the site is distribution. "The main issue right now is the distribution channel," she says. "A lot of people might have the ability to edit video at home, but they don't have the infrastructure to stream it."

So if you're itching to share your own adventures with the world, you'll want a video camera that uses MiniDV tapes rather than Hi-8, VHS, or other consumer formats. DV—digital video—does not degrade when copied, so you can transfer video from camera to computer, edit it, and transfer it back with no loss of quality. For traveling, you want a camera that's light and small—consider either the Sony DCR-PC100 ($2,099) or the Canon Ultura ($999). Next, you need a fast computer with a FireWire (IEEE 1394) port, such as the iMac DV ($1,299), or you'll need a FireWire card (about $200) if you have a PC. And don't forget a big, fast hard drive—five minutes of digital video requires about a gig of disk space.

And try not to get trampled while you're on location.