Broadcasters dial up datacasting

Rich multimedia will have another pipeline to the home in about a year, if the broadcast TV groups that signed onto iBlast have anything to say about it.

The 12 broadcasters, with 143 local TV stations reaching more than 80% of U.S. households, and the nation's top 25 media markets have agreed to let the new content delivery company use parts of their digital broadcasting spectrum to download music, video, games and software to end users' PCs at speeds faster than cable Internet or DSL.

The iBlast initiative is the latest attempt to monetize the spectrum that the FCC allocated to broadcasters for transmitting digital content alongside their analog signals. Those loans were intended to be recalled by 2006, at which time, it was thought that 85% of all viewers would have digital signals. But a slow take-up rate among consumers has pushed the deadline back, and stations are looking to monetize these spectrum assets - and earn a return on their own investments in digital transmission equipment.

An answer may lie in a datacast delivery service that is free to end users, iBlast executives said.

While shared networks work for most communications purposes, such as e-mail or Web pages, they break down when an attraction becomes too popular - behold this week's failed downloads of Stephen King's new Web-only title "Riding the Bullet" from sites such as Amazon.com and bn.com.

"We see television like any other transport stream," said Oliver Luckett, iBlast's chief technology officer. "Because it's now digital, it's just another transport medium. We encapsulate IP inside of an MPEG 2, and it looks just like an ATM cell, only bigger - 188 bytes in length."

TV's datacasting attributes make it a competitor to the Internet content delivery specialists that offer scalable downloads and quality of service, Luckett said.

"Companies like Akamai, Digital Island and Sandpiper give a perceived quality of service over existing local connections, but they're also scalable," he said. "Well, TV is infinitely scalable, and it's guaranteed quality of service."

iBlast should have an edge over other delivery companies because of cost per download. "When you're paying out to Akamai or Exodus or Sandpiper, you're paying out per bit that goes through you," Luckett said. "The more popular you are, the more you're punished. Our broadcast signal goes past 82 million homes right now. The more people use it, the less it costs per use."

There are some limitations to using TV as a data delivery medium. For one, it requires an antenna on or inside the PC. "The problem with datacasting is the lack of receivers in the market right now," said Bruce Kasrel, a senior analyst at Forrester Research.

iBlast is working with OEMs to ensure that when the service launches in early 2001, USB antennas will be available in the marketplace and a good proportion of PCs and game consoles shipped will contain tuner cards and TV chips.

Second, because broadcast is a one-way transmission medium, downloads will have to be scheduled. For software, this might mean an e-mail notification system or a game site might "carousel" datacasts of popular titles - sending them over the airwaves every half hour.

For other elements, such as movie clips, it might mean getting users' permission to datacast video automatically into their hard drive caches - a variant on the old PointCast "push" model. So when registered users log onto their favorite movie listing site, they could get personalized data such as show times and local theater programs from the Web but call up film clips from their own hard drives - in full-screen, 600 kb/s video.

The value proposition is compelling for content providers, Luckett said. "If I send out 1 million copies of `Doom III' over the Internet at 500 Mb/s a copy, that's five terabytes of data," he said. "We can send between 100 Gb/s and 400 Gb/s a day right now, to one person or a million people. We co-exist alongside the cable modem and the DSL connection, and we think we're going to be a very valuable IP connection to the PC or the Internet appliance."