[opendtv] Re: PBS National Datacast

FROM:
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6308573.html?&display=Features&referral=SUPP

w w w . b r o a d c a s t i n g c a b l e . c o m

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      'Beam' Me Up-in Analog
      Disney's VOD service relaunches with new investors, HD movies, same 
old platform
      By Glen Dickson -- Broadcasting & Cable, 2/20/2006


                  In this story:
                  Costly service



      Broadcasters are distributing video-on-demand (VOD) movies, including 
high-definition titles, to a set-top device with reams of disk storage. 
Sounds like a perfect application for the digital television (DTV) spectrum, 
doesn't it?

      Not necessarily. The "datacasting" application is actually being 
delivered over analog spectrum by MovieBeam, a VOD service tested by Disney 
in 2004 and relaunched last week as a separate company. MovieBeam features a 
$48.8 million war chest, heavyweight partners like Cisco and Intel, and an 
agreement by 39 PBS stations in 29 markets to use their analog broadcasts to 
deliver the service.

      The MovieBeam set-top box, which is being sold under Cisco's Linksys 
brand for $199.99 (after a $50 rebate), doesn't have a DTV tuner. In fact, 
it doesn't have a functional analog tuner either. It comprises a small 
indoor antenna, 160-gigabyte (GB) hard drive, the necessary chip technology 
to receive the datacasts, and a host of inputs and outputs.

      But the box won't work in its current configuration come February 
2009, when analog broadcasts cease and DTV takes over. MovieBeam executives 
say there is an easy upgrade path to DTV, by connecting to a peripheral 
tuner, and they have an option to use PBS stations' DTV spectrum through 
their deal with National Datacast, the for-profit PBS subsidiary that 
aggregated the analog spectrum.

      Executives at PBS stations that were involved in early tests insist 
MovieBeam works well on the analog spectrum. "I was pleasantly surprised by 
its success," says Michael Boylan, president/CEO of WJCT Jacksonville, Fla.

      Still, some are wondering why Movie­Beam isn't using the DTV 
spectrum now. "I think this is about five years too late," says one engineer 
familiar with the technology. "The world has moved on."

      It has been suggested that MovieBeam's investors, which include 
venture-capital firms Mayfield Fund and Norwest Venture Partners, are 
betting that analog won't shut down on time. MovieBeam and National Datacast 
executives say that they're planning on the 2009 turnoff date but, right 
now, analog broadcasting is more reliable as a national platform than the 
DTV spectrum.

      "This gives us a robustness we wouldn't have otherwise," says 
MovieBeam President/CEO Tres Izzard. "For DTV reception, many homes require 
the installation of an outdoor antenna with line-of-sight to the tower. What 
we get is the ability for a small indoor antenna to provide a simple 
plug-and-play service."

      Kevin Fong, managing director of Mayfield Fund and a MovieBeam 
director, says MovieBeam was simply looking for the best coverage at the 
lowest price. "The analog signal footprint is very well understood," he 
says.

      Using the analog spectrum to deliver movies as digital files is much 
slower than with digital. National Datacast says the throughput of the 
MovieBeam service is around 1.2 megabits per second (Mbps); DTV stations 
could do it four to five times faster while still supporting high-def 
broadcasts. But MovieBeam backers say delivery speed doesn't matter, since 
the disk-based set-top doesn't need to receive the movies in real time and 
the service will send only 10 new movies a week, one or two in high-def.

      The service is using Microsoft's Windows Media 9 (also know as VC-1) 
advanced compression scheme to encode the movies at considerably lower data 
rates than current MPEG-2 applications, allowing it to send a 
standard-definition movie as a 1.5-GB file and a high-def movie in 4 GB or 5 
GB. That equates to encoding rates of around 1.7 Mbps for an SD movie and 
5.7 Mbps for an HD movie and a transfer time of around two hours and eight 
hours, respectively.

      "We have a hard-disk cache, and we are able to use the bandwidth 24 
hours a day," says Fong. "We trickle movies from the hard disk, and 
consumers don't see the downloading times."

      Costly service
      WJCT's Boylan says MovieBeam's upfront cost "seems a little 
 high"-particularly since the $4 rental for a movie is what Comcast charges 
for VOD titles. But he notes that his station gets paid either way; the 
annual revenues that PBS stations get from National Datacast for providing 
spectrum are based on their market size, not the adoption of the service.

      Josh Bernoff, principal analyst with Forrester Research, says that 
offering HD movies on-demand is a selling point for MovieBeam. But he thinks 
the Movie­Beam box still doesn't have that much potential as a 
stand-alone product. "This thing belongs as a feature of a DVR or satellite 
box," he says. "The idea of a separate set-top whose only purpose is movie 
rental-that is pretty challenging for a product like that to succeed."

      One broadcast source suggested that MovieBeam might use a different 
delivery method, such as the Internet or cable, to feed the box in the 
future. And incorporating MovieBeam's functionality into a broader consumer 
product may be the goal for Cisco, which recently entered the set-top market 
with its purchase of Scientific-Atlanta, and Intel, which is promoting the 
"Viiv" home-entertainment PC platform.

      Intel spokesman Kent Cook considers MovieBeam "an interesting model 
for content delivery" and says Intel is "working very aggressively" at 
creating a Viiv-based product, such as a set-top, that would also receive 
the MovieBeam service. He adds, "Stay tuned."


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Albert Manfredi" <bert22306@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, February 22, 2006 9:26 PM
Subject: [opendtv] PBS National Datacast


> John Shutt wrote:
>
>>Moviebeam is using NTSC with dotcast.  PBS has not allocated
>>any DTV bits to any datacasting service at all at this time.
>
> Well, this site:
>
> http://www.pbs.org/digitaltv/dataNS.html
>
> says that PBS either is, or soon will be, providing this datacast service
> over their DTT transmitter. It's called PBS National Datacast. And it 
> makes
> sense, especially if the previous dotcast was limited in its coverage, as
> the article explaining how it works said. (They gave the example of 1.7
> million viewers in the LA area, which is a small fraction of that
> population.)
>
> But you're right, they don't mention Moviebeam by name. They say:
>
> "The Digital Difference
>
> "As PBS stations in the data broadcasting network convert to digital
> broadcasts, PBS NATIONAL DATACAST will begin offering commercial 
> datacasting
> services over digital television transmissions."
>
> It seems a natural fit for Moviebeam and other similar services.
>
> This could work well, actually, and it's not cold fusion at all. Since the
> Moviebeam folk are clever, they may well have added another layer of 
> forward
> error correction to the basic Viterbi 2/3 and RS[208,188] when 
> transmitting
> their proprietary file formats over DTT. They would achieve a C/N margin
> improvement similar to what E8-VSB provides. Why not? After all, their
> streams don't need to conform to any standard other than to fit in the
> MPEG-2 TS frame, with appropriate non-conflcting headers. They could use
> A/90, the LLC/SNAP header option to avoid any problems with conflicts, 
> then
> add more interleaving and more redundancy to the packet stream.
>
> The extra FEC may be enough to make the indoor antenna work in most cases,
> even if you get no usable signal when trying to watch the real-time DTT
> channel of that same station.
>
>>We are on the list to have our analog transmitter modified, but I can't
>>believe they will still go through with it.
>
> It has to be considerably better than Dotcast over NTSC. Did you read how
> that works? It's similar to IBOC radio, when the radio channel is also
> carrying the analog station. Except it's possibly even more compromised,
> since it is fit right around the VSB carrier, in a relatively very narrow
> band (not in the relatively much larger guard band IBOC depends on),
> apparently heavily attenuated before transmisssion, and uses plain QAM
> instead of COFDM. I would expect that for such a system to work reliably,
> the Moviebeam clever lads have already figured out how to add in 
> robustness
> in the data packet stream.
>
> Bert
>
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