DATACASTING: THE REAL FUTURE OF DTV?

  • Speakers:
  • Date & time: Thursday, 3 August 2000
    • 6:30 PM Social hour with refreshments plus equipment demonstrations
    7:30 PM Program
    >>>Equipmentdemonstrations before and after the program
  • Meeting organizer: Roy Trumbull, KRON-TV

    •  

    Program:

    With the ongoing confusion over digital TV transmission standards, slowmanufacturer response on the consumer equipment side, and a marked apathyamong potential DTV set buyers, digital television in the U.S. is off toa very rocky start. Some say there is no chance for the nearly 100 percentpenetration into American homes enjoyed by NTSC, with only major marketseventually having reasonably large DTV program viewership. Meanwhile, evensmall-market stations are installing DTV origination and transmission facilitiesmandated by the government.

    How will American broadcasters make money from DTV? Datacasting mayend up paying the bills for many, if not most, DTV installations in thiscountry. To some, including the FCC, this may come as a surprise. It'sa little like buying a product and finding the cardboard box it came inis more useful to you.

    Frank Logan of Motorola's Satellite and Broadcast Network Systems willshow how Motorola/GI approaches and facilitates datacasting. Frank willreview ATSC encoders and discuss various scenarios for datacasting, inaddition to fixed data rates, opportunistic data, stat-muxed data and videoservices.

    People from Triveni Digital will discuss data and content aggregation,data servers for datacasting, IP encapsulation, and the various techniquesfor data insertion, including external mux, e.g., Skystream, and thosethat are internal to the encoder, including Motorola. Triveni will alsotalk about the reception of data by the consumer. KICU in San Jose is usinga Triveni Skyscraper Datacasting system, and we hope to have some livecontent demos available at the meeting.

    OTHER GEAR DEMOS:

    According to Roy Trumbull of KRON-TV, who will offer a call-letter stationperspective to DTV datacasting, the Motorola demonstration will use dataencoded on a GI unit at KRON. There will be a demo of the program schedulescreens created by the Triveni PSIP Builder Pro. The Triveni SkyscraperDigital Television Data Broadcast system will also be demonstrated usinga data stream from the <<SF Gate>> website <http://sfgate.com/>.The data broadcast will be received using a Skyscraper DataReceiver ina Windows 98 computer.
     

    Welcome:

    SMPTEsf  welcomes members and friends to attend without charge.Reservations are not required for this meeting.

    Location:

    Silicon Graphics Inc.
    1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy. Mountain View, California
    Building 40 -- the SGI PresentationCenter

    Very Important! There is a concert at Shoreline this night. Please read and follow carefullyto avoid most traffic and parking problems. Approach Building 40 from CharlestonRoad whether you come from the Rengstorff Ave. exit or you exit at ShorelineBlvd. Avoid Amphitheatre Parkway by turning onto Charleston Road!!

    At the driveway to Building 40,there will be a guard to keep Shoreline concert goers from parking in SGIlots. If you have your SMPTE membership card you can show that to the guard,otherwise we suggest you print out a copy of this notice to present oryou should be able to explain that you are here to attend the SMPTE meetingin building 40. May we also suggest that you allow some extra time to arriveand if you get there earlier, then just join us for extra refreshmentsand see the demos working.

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