CruiseCast prepped for commercial launch by AT&T

Although AT&T hasn’t confirmed its official launch date for its in-vehicle satellite television service, developed in conjunction with RaySat, its partners are gearing up for the service’s introduction. OSS firm Synchronoss announced it will power the customer care front and back ends for AT&T’s CruiseCast with its ConvergenceNow Plus platform. NDS will provide the conditional access, middleware and integration, alongside Harmonic video compression and stream processing, ST Electronics circuitry and Hyundai Digital Technology in-vehicle receivers.

RaySat, which manufactures satellite antennas, is a subset of RaySat Broadcasting Corporation (RBC). Winston Guillory, president of Raysat, said that CruiseCast was started in collaboration with AT&T’s business development group and has since been which moved out to RBC. AT&T licensed the CruiseCast brand to RBC to go to market and take advantage of the work AT&T already did on the service, he said.

Though AT&T’s U-Verse IPTV service, this work has included coordinating and getting programming contracts off the ground for CruiseCast. At launch, the service will include 42 entertainment channels, 22 satellite TV and 20 radio channels from a variety of kids and family, documentary, music, comedy, news and sports programming, as well as five channels from MTV. The service mirrors traditional satellite TV with the same programming guide and commercials.

Mobile TV has been challenged in vehicles in the past because of unreliable, subpar performance and the need for bulky antennas. Unlike past services, CruiseCast relies on a compact antenna, about the size of a bicycle helmet on the vehicle’s roof, Guillory said. The satellite signal persists through overpasses, buildings and other obstructions by using cables that are run into a satellite mobile entertainment receiver that’s hidden in the car along with a small RF receiver. RBC put in multiple satellite signals that can aggregate several inputs together inside the in-vehicle set-top box. Even if the transmission gets clipped out at any point, the consumer doesn’t see it; another transmission covers the hole, Guillory added.

“The challenges you have in driving this product to the back seat of the car is that the quality suffers when you build it for a smaller screen,” he said. “We have a fat pipe coming in, so we can get high-quality video and we can drive the screens in the back of the vehicle. I’ve even seen us driving 20- and 30-inch screens of good quality. So if you hooked up the TV in the back of the SUV, you are happy with the signal you are getting.”