Airborne Bandwidth Brings Data from the Skies

How is this done?

No matter if the television program is digital or analog or whether it’s sent by broadcast transmission, satellite downlink or cable dissemination the problem is the same find a space for data. So, the first requirement is the broadcaster must identify some place within the structure of the broadcast signal where a programmer can tuck in some additional data. Of course, we define this within a broadcasting standard.

With analog NTSC, the Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI) contains that data space. When you see a black bar at the bottom of your picture when the image rolls for some reason, you’re looking at the VBI. It’s an underused portion of the signal, a place to put, for instance, close-captioning for the hearing impaired. Back in 1996, Intel introduced Intercast, a technology that enabled PC users to receive data from TV signals. The VBI also transmits that data. While other data, such as streaming video, software downloads or interactive content can be sent in the VBI, it has a limited capacity.

Airborne datacasting is much richer in a digital context. DTV broadcasts long streams of bits, those zeros and ones that make up the genetic code of all things digital. Think of the station transmitter as some kind of modem. Each HDTV channel has a place for about 19.2Mbs (that’s megabits per second) of data that can be added to a broadcast. That’s a lot faster than your generic 56k modem connected over a regular phone line. These bit streams can contain any kind of data: audio, video, text, databases, programsyou name it. This data can carry anything from the newest version of "Doom" to the entirety of Moby Dick in text format. A software developer could send out a demo while his 15-second spot is on-screen. If you liked what you saw in the ad, you could run the demo and check out its features.

Whether it’s NTSC or DTV, a television broadcast can now become part of the Internet. Your antenna is now a very fast network connection receiving data linked to the show you’re watching. Entering passive couch potato mode when you watch TV is always an option, but now you have a choice and can go interactive with your viewing instead.

The idea of datacasting emerged out of the interactive television experiments of the past twenty years. In the eighties and early nineties companies like TCI, Time Warner and Bell Atlantic ran trials of interactive television in test markets around the country. Mainly, they offered basic on-line shopping, games and the like. As a matter of fact, right now NTSC television stations all over the country broadcast data mixed with their programming signals. But this is just the beginning.

Enter the Set-top Box

The ever-present set-top box can play an important role in this process. The now data-laden broadcast signal can pass through a set-top by way of the cable coming from your antenna, satellite or cable service, and display the results on your television. The set-top box processes the data, stores some of it, and runs applications. The soon-to-be-announced Wink-enabled set-top boxes are good examples of those capable of decoding data from broadcast signals, as are some of the various WebTV boxes. Dish Network’s OpenTV receivers and DirecTV’s iWink receiver are examples of satellite boxes slated to become capable of doing this. General Instrument’s DCT-5000 is an example of a next-generation cable set-top box.

It’s interesting to note that the operating systems barroom brawl between Microsoft and just about everyone else spills out from computing and into the set-top box arena. Both Windows CE and Sun’s Java vie for the set-top operating system of choice.

ATVEF

The Advanced Television Enhancement Forum (ATVEF), an industry alliance including Intel, PBS, Microsoft, CableLabs, NBC, Sony, Disney and others, put together a specification to merge video programs and ‘Net data regardless of whether it’s delivery mode: broadcast, cable or satellite. In a word, ATVEF has an all-platform capability.

By now you must be wondering about that "get pizza" comment made earlier. Can this really be done? The answer is a resounding yes. RespondTV, the former B3TV, ran an ATVEF-encoded ad during a San Francisco broadcast. During the commercial for Domino’s Pizza, viewers with WebTV used the small banner at the bottom of the screen to order a pizza while watching the show. The viewer saw, made choices and ordered, all with a few clicks of the remote. Within a very short while the pie guy rang the doorbell. From an e-commerce perspective there are a lot of pluses here. Not only can you have it your way, you can have it at your place as well. There’s real-time interactivity. With orders processed instantly, personalization results over time. Thus ads become targeted content, which in turn, increases response. Ordering from a remote is a customer-friendly experience. As they say, three clicks and the pizza is on its way. Now where’s that remote of mine?

OpenTV

ATVEF isn’t the only standard out there on the airborne data flyways. OpenTV emphasizes using Java to add interactivity to broadcast transmissions. With a Java connection, it comes as no surprise that Sun, a bigtime rival of ATVEF’s principal founder Microsoft, is the company’s part owner. Remember the operating systems barroom brawl? In addition to Sun, General Instrument, Liberty Digital, News Corporation and Time Warner all have a stake in OpenTV. As with ATVEF, OpenTV has an all-platform capability.

OpenTV’s capabilities are similar to ATVEF’s. There’s program-linked interactivity with real-time displays of contextual information. Of course, there’s e-commerce linked to advertising spots. There’s even the multiple-camera selection option for OpenTV-enabled sports events. All available at the click of a remote.

More than 6.1 Million people on a global basis already use OpenTV. According to the company, 24 television networks worldwide use the OpenTV approach. Examples include British Sky Broadcasting and EchoStar here in the States.

Geocast

Where OpenTV and ATVEF are interactive with a TV set-top box orientation, Geocast comes at it from a desktop PC perspective. When the service is launched at the end of 2000, it will provide a rich media program service, beyond the Internet, that delivers high-quality audiovisual and interactive content, over the air, direct to the PC desktop. No more jerky dancing pixels on a post-it note streaming video, Geocast will deliver broadcast quality images.

Instead of a set-top box, there is a receiver connecting directly to the PC, a Pentium II or faster, via the USB port. The receiver will be available for under $300. It can accept live feeds and also contains a hard-drive for storing on-demand retrieval content. Thomson multimedia intends to sell an RCA-branded receiver.

With Geocast, there will be no ongoing monthly fees for the basic service. The user can still use his or her existing Internet provider for e-mail, Web access and Geocast transactions. The service works equally well with the user’s existing dial-up phone access, DSL or cable modem. Geocast will provide PC users with a customized selection of local and global information, entertainment offerings and of course e-commerce opportunities with national brands and distributors. There will also be downloadable software and music files.

The Internet’s point-to-point (unicast) architecture was never designed to deliver media content. So we get network congestion, buffering delays, low frame rates and compression artifacts. On the ‘Net, the more users served, the more infrastructure, such as servers and routers, is needed. But with broadcast (multicast), a single one-to-many transmission can serve millions of users with no additional infrastructure. Thus the Geocast approach bypasses the congestion and delays of the Internet. By moving beyond the Internet and partnering with broadcasters, Geocast programming with full-motion video and CD-quality sound comes through the data elements of the DTV signal.

This Geocast network brings together an array of broadcasters, software developers and venture capitalists. Among them is Electronic Arts, making it quite likely that some innovative and striking interactive, multi-player games will be in that programming mix.

Wink

Wink, as with most of the others, has an all-platform capability. But unlike the rest, Wink is free. Wink’s client/server software is coded small, lean and tight. It’s based on the Interactive Communicating Applications Protocol (ICAP), a Wink-developed standard, for simple cross-platform applications. Wink software engines are deployed in cable set-top boxes or directly in TVs. They act as clients, running applications sent out by the Wink broadcast server. Wink utilizes the vertical blanking interval as the pipeline for its transmissions.

These transmissions are graphically simple icons and banners, not intrusive to viewers. Often they appear as a flashing "I" in the corner of the TV screen. They alert viewers to information or services gotten by clicking the remote. For example, on Court TV, while watching a trial, viewers can use Wink to get summaries of the plaintiff’s case or consult a legal dictionary.

Wink technology also lets TV programmers set up links from the main channel to other channels or to Web sites. From CNN it can push viewers to a CNN Interactive channel that lists updated sports, business or political news.

A large group of broadcasters, cable programmers and satellite providers enhance their programming with Wink. Included among its partners are CBS, NBC, The Weather Channel, CNN Headline News, the Discovery Channel, TLC and many more. Manufacturers are using Wink as well. For example Ford uses Wink to generate leads for potential customers. Well, the pie guy is banging on the door and it’s time to go. With all that airborne bandwidth coming at us, it’s a sure thing that television of tomorrow is going to be different than that of today. It has already begun to change. Stay tuned.

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