DTV "Datacasting" -- Hey, It's Working!

Speaker: Peter Ludé, Executive Vice President, Network Operations and Engineering, iBlast, Inc. (www.iblast.com)
  • Date & time: Thursday, 28 March 2002
    • 6:00 - 7:30 PM No-Host Pizza Dinner
    7:30 PM Program
    Meeting organizer: Roy Trumbull
     
  • Program:

    • Some analysts believe the telephone companies and cablecasters are fumbling the ball in their rollout of DSL and cable-modem broadband Internet connections to US homes, delaying by years the 75% or greater penetration rate many content providers need to be profitable. (VHS home video enjoys a 95% rate. DVD video has already reached 20% after only four years.) Consumers and content providers would welcome a way around the telco/cable bottleneck. Satellite-based services, such as Hughes' DirecPC (sic; no wonder our children can't spell!) and terrestrial microwave ventures such as Sprint Broadband (which has recently stopped all new installations due to financial losses), offer some "high-speed" connectivity alternatives.

    There's yet another high-speed connective mode that gives consumers access to digit-heavy content: data piggybacked on digital television (DTV) transmissions. After some initial delays, terrestrial data broadcasting is now a reality. Using surplus capacity on the DTV broadcast spectrum has gone from an engineering concept a few years ago to a viable business model today.

    Data broadcasting allows the surplus digital capacity of DTV stations to beam content -- including encoded music, video programming, games, e-books, and web files -- directly to users' PCs and other Internet appliances. Even while broadcasting high-definition programming full time, each DTV station still has the capability of broadcasting an additional 50 to 100 gigabytes of data each day. Standard-definition DTV broadcasts naturally allow even more additional data to be carried.

    Recent improvements in DTV receivers, 8VSB demodulation technology, antennas, and software applications are allowing the creation of a wireless data broadcast infrastructure. Within the last few months, the first thousand end-users have subscribed to various datacasting services across the country, with strong growth projected in the next several years.

    About a dozen US TV stations are now datacasting using several different business models, including news VOD (video on demand), Internet accelerators, and content distribution. iBlast and its competitors are not Internet Service Providers (ISP); they complement the Internet. Consumers will still need their ISPs to conduct two-way transactions, such as e-mail and e-commerce.

    Pete Ludé, iBlast's chief engineer, will give us some background on the development of ATSC standards and various datacasting technologies, as well as provide an update of the "state of the art" of the entire datacasting industry. This is also a good chance for input on SMPTE matters: Pete is one of our SMPTE Western Region Governors and welcomes your comments and suggestions about both the local and the national SMPTE organizations.

    Please join us for pizza, drinks, and conversation at the Round Table restaurant in Menlo Park, and hear why data broadcasting could prove to be the "killer app" in the nation's conversion to DTV.

    Peter Hammar
    SMPTE-SF Secretary
     
     

    Welcome:

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

    Location:

    A NEW VENUE WITH A NEW MENU: Many people don't have time to eat as they rush from work to SMPTE meetings. For that reason, the officers of the SMPTE-SF have tried hard over the past few years to arrange for refreshments at our meetings. That gets expensive for a volunteer organization, although sometimes corporate sponsors generously supply food and drink. This month, we're trying something different: you can have some fun with pizza, other goodies, and drinks (like, beer, eh?) while enjoying a technical presentation in a relaxed atmosphere. It's "no host"—you buy—but you've got to get dinner somewhere!

    This Round Table has a separate, quiet meeting room closed off from the main area that will neatly accommodate us.

    Here's an interesting fact in culinary history: This Menlo Park restaurant was the first-ever Round Table, the one that started the chain.

    See you there on Thursday, 28th!

    Round Table Pizza
    1225 El Camino Real [at Oak Grove Ave.],
    Menlo Park, CA 94025-4208

    PARKING: The Round Table in Menlo Park has two dozen spaces of its own, plus there's a huge, free municipal parking lot only a few yards from the restaurant, behind the buildings on the south side of Oak Grove Ave.
     
     

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