[opendtv] Re: PBS National Datacast

Once more, this time with feeling.

PBS National Datacast is the negotiating arm that stands between the member 
stations and data providers.  They negotiate contracts, they do not install 
the data hardware then go out looking for customers.  In every single case 
of datacasting that National Datacast has negotiated, the data customer 
provides the hardware at customer expense to each participating member 
station, and will also include installation costs if the installation is not 
plug and play.  Although National Datacast promotes a monolithic coast to 
coast data delivery infrastructure via PBS Member Stations, Member stations 
are free to participate or decline to participate in any data delivery 
venture.  About half of the stations currently participate in vertical 
interval data delivery.

Dotcast is a technology that Disney/Moviebeam brought to National Datacast 
and said "we will pay you to put this on your stations."  National Datacast 
did not install Dotcast technology at member stations then go out try to 
drum up customers to use it.  PBS did not select Dotcast as a technology. 
National Datacast does not sell data time on Dotcast.

PBS member stations over the years have facilitated three ways to deliver 
data.  First and foremost, which is still in use, is the vertical interval 
of NTSC.  We used to provide much more data there than we do now.  Over the 
years all of our other customers have moved to internet or other 
technologies to disseminate their proprietary data.  Currently we only 
provide the Gemstar/TV Guide data for stand alone EPG STBs and for those few 
analog televisions and VCRs (mainly RCA?) that have the guide function built 
in.  We also provide data for VCRs that will autoset their built in clocks 
via XDS extensions to the Closed Captioning data.

The second way was with a technology that Microsoft invented for use with 
their ActiMate toys, which they called Horizontal OveSrcan (HOS) Data.  For 
those unfamiliar with ActiMate toys, they were plush dolls that were both 
mechanically animated and had audio capability.  A child could watch a 
Barney videotape with an ActiMates Barney doll in his/her lap, and the doll 
would respond to certain things that occurred on-screen.  (You can only hear 
the stupid thing say "super de-duper" so many times before you hurl it 
across the room.)  Videotapes were encoded with data in the form of either 
black or white blocks during the first few microseconds of each video line. 
The data would be hidden in the normal overscan of most televisions.  If you 
had an underscan monitor, you would see the vertical row of dots along the 
left edge of the image, similar to the row of dots along the top edge that 
is the Closed Captioning data.  The video out of the VCR was fed into a 
small box that decoded the data and broadcast it wirelessly to the doll. 
The data included animation cues, voice cues from a preprogrammed list of 
words and phrases, and phonetic data for words not in the base vocabulary. 
Eventually, Microsoft got a waiver from the FCC to have PBS member stations 
include the HOS data in their broadcast signal, and paid PBS to encode and 
broadcast episodes of Barney and Arthur.  This system flopped (due in no 
small part to the $100+ price tags of the Barney, Arthur, and DW dolls) so 
it was turned off at least 18 months ago.

The third way National Datacast can sell bit time is via Dotcast.  Only a 
handful of stations have been modified By Disney/Moviebeam to provide 
Dotcast data to Moviebeam boxes.

To reiterate, PBS does not care how well or poorly Dotcast performs compared 
to NTSC.  PBS and National Datacast did not select the Dotcast technology. 
PBS and National Datacast did not promote this technology.  PBS and National 
Datacast were approached by Disney/Moviebeam to transmit it.

There are currently no data services brokered by National Datacast on ATSC. 
Dotcast is said to provide about 4 Mbps of data, and National Datacast will 
have a very hard time convincing member stations to carve out 4 Mbps out of 
their 19.4 Mbps to continue this service after analog cutoff.  Most PBS 
Member Stations are already multicasting and squeezing the PBS HD feed to 
the point of breaking.  Any future data services will have to be 
opportunistic data that replaces stuffing bits, which would be about 1 Mbps 
on average.

John

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Albert Manfredi" <bert22306@xxxxxxxxxxx>

> I think it's basically what John Shutt "stands by," although I seriously
> dount that PBS thinks Dotcast provides better coverage than ATSC can.


 
 
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