J did t know if any of you knew anything about datacasting.
The public television industry is hedging their bets on success and future
funding by working their way knot the good graces of stated educational
departments by “offering” this great technology of embedding data into
their tv broadcast stream and getting school j formation and homework to
students in rural areas.
Of course they’re lining of big deals with most states as an exclusive
thing that public tv can do. However most states are t 100 percent covered
by public tv signals.
A company called Westpond has the equipment but a guy named Mark O’Brien
from Spectrarep has locked them up so they won’t sell to anyone else.
They want to control it all. However this really isn’t something special.
All tv stations could do it
Indiana just gave a $20 million grant to make it happen. And you know it
won’t take $20 million to do this. Basically it’s giving up a subchannel
and getting word files, PDFs and some video into the tv stream and then
providing a box to every student at home and an antenna to get the station
and a way to “download” the data from the stream.
If we could figure a way to do this I think this would be a sustainable
revenue stream for a few years to come or u til rural broadband becomes a
reality.
Curious on your thoughts?
Becky
