Craig Birkmaier wrote: >> As always, I disagree on the "back channel." This would take away >> two of the biggest advantages of OTA broadcast: simplicity and >> scalability. > > Clearly you do not have a clue about what i am talking about. > > Broadcasters need to know who is watching, not just vague > demographics provided by the ratings services. As already discussed, you don't want a "back channel" at all. Which is why I keep putting in in quotes. In other words, you do not want a simple uplink, to be combined with the broadcast downlink. That idea, associated with a 20 Mb/s downlink for an entire TV market, is completely preposterous. What you are really asking for is a separate interactive session between broadcasters and their audience. That is actually already done, or at least it's AVAILABLE, from all of the major TV networks *and* from many local TV stations. It is not tightly coupled with each broadcast viewing session, however, although it takes no leap of genius to understand that it COULD BE, and that it COULD even eventually supplant the broadcast channel entirely. > This is not about simplicity or scalability. It is about the > survival of the medium. Believe it or not, I though of that angle last night. And my answer to that is that the NAB *could* potentially approach the FCC with this: "The FCC must either include an Internet link to each ATSC TV, or FOTA TV in the US cannot survive." And possibly then, the FCC will update the "tuner mandate." I see no other practical alternative. But now this becomes inescapable. Eventually broadcasters would realise that they are downloading SO MANY unicast streams out of their servers that they might as well add the "broadcast" stream to these wired links, and abolish the OTA network altogether. As I said, this negates the scaling attributes of broadcast, but in principle it's not hard to do. > there have been a number of successful music video "jukebox" > services where you call a phone number and ask for a particular > title, which is then placed into the playback queue. Exactly. That's NOT a "backchannel." That is a completely separate interactive, two-way link and separate session you set up. Exactly the same as done on "talk radio" with callers dialing in by telephone. This concept is completely orthogonal to anything "digital" about television. Bert ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.