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Date: Thu, 01 Jan 1998 23:56:20
From: John Walker
Subject: Why Data Broadcast May Take Over the World
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Why Data Broadcast May Take Over the World
Wouldn't it be nice to have instant access to sports scores, stock
prices--even music and video? You will, once a new technology called
data broadcast takes off.
J. William Gurley
http://www.pathfinder.com/fortune/digitalwatch/0112tec2.htmll
Invisible airwaves crackle with life Bright antennae bristle with the
energy Emotional feedback on timeless wavelength Bearing a gift beyond
price, almost free. Rush, "Spirit of Radio"
You thought the Internet was a revolution? Just wait. Over the next
year or so, a new means of information distribution called data
broadcasting will simultaneously upset the market for Internet
content, topple the current standards in the consumer-electronics
industry, save the hard-drive industry from its worst slump in years,
and qualify the federal government's HDTV bandwidth grant as the
greatest charity event in the history of the world.
So what is data broadcasting? Just what it sounds like: a system that
sends huge amounts of data to a huge number of people simultaneously.
This information could be anything that might appeal to multiple
users--stock market prices, say, or sports scores. But isn't the
Internet supposed to do all this? Well, no. The Internet does very
well with one-to-one interactive applications like E-mail; it does
poorly in situations where it has to broadcast information to many
people at once. Applications like audio and video "streaming" place
severe strain on the Internet. This strain is compounded in cases
where a lot of people want to see that same information at once, in
the event of a stock market crash, for example, or any major piece of
news.
How will data broadcast work? We will first need technology in our
homes to connect either the PC or a television set-top box to a
broadcast network. For cable or satellite networks, the connection
will be via coaxial cable. But the first wave of data broadcast will
likely use excess capacity in VHF channels, so we may witness the
irony of bunny ears attached to our PCs. Once we're hooked up, data
broadcasters will broadcast to our homes continuously. Our devices
will be programmed to capture the data that we might want.
This whole model assumes two things: one, that storing information is
so cheap that it makes sense to blast bits everywhere on the chance
that someone might want to see it; two, that network bandwidth is
scarce and expensive. Data broadcast avoids networking bottlenecks and
dumps the information people want into inexpensive data repositories.
The technology for all this has actually been around for years, but
storage is cheap now, while bandwidth is dear, making the conditions
perfect for this old technology to shine.
Data broadcasting will never replace the Internet. It is not
interactive. Electronic trading and commerce cannot take place over
this network. However, commodity content like stock prices, sports
scores, news reports, and weather clearly belong on such a network.
This information is plentiful and free, and there is no reason not to
put it in the air where everyone can get to it quickly. No more
waiting for the modem to connect; no more waiting for clumsy graphics
to download. Just point, click, and enjoy. Broadcasting data is
amazingly inexpensive. Every minute, about 175 DirecTV channels soar
past your head. Just one of those channels could handle 32 megabits of
data each second. That's a ton of data, and that's just one channel.
These incredible bandwidth speeds might create markets that we
wouldn't have expected for years. For instance, the Wall Street
Journal could arrive every morning as a 20-megabyte multimedia
application, complete with videos and stock charts on all equities.
Software updates could be broadcast in a flash. Most important, the
market for purely digital audio and video could finally explode.
Such a market for downloadable audio and video should have a huge
effect on the consumer-electronics industry. Manufacturers seem
obsessed with fixed-length storage formats such as CDs and DVDs, an
obsession rooted in a belief that music and movies will forever be
sold in stores as prerecorded physical objects. But with
data-broadcast networks solving the bandwidth problem, large storage
devices, such as hard drives, can act as music and video
repositories. Uncompressed CD-quality stereo sound occupies ten
megabytes a minute. Liquid Audio, the leader in high-end audio
encoding and delivery, can compress that to about one megabyte a
minute. (My venture capital firm has an investment in Liquid Audio.)
So IBM's new 16.8-gigabyte disk drive could hold 16,800 minutes of
music, or over 300 full-length albums. With capacity like that, a
hard drive connected to a broadcast network could replace the CD
player. The hard drive would have unlimited and immediate access to
all songs. Want to hear every instrumental ballad in your collection
recorded before 1940? No problem. Would you like that in reverse
chronological order, or sorted by title?
But don't people still want a portable medium? Quick, cheap,
high-capacity storage media will solve this problem. One-gigabyte
drives from Iomega and SyQuest are fast enough to support audio, and
these drives can store 1,000 minutes of Liquid Audio-based music.
Flash-memory cards might make an even better solution--they can
withstand more shock than a spinning mechanical device. Whatever the
technical details, this bit-based model will emerge within the next
24 months.
If you think this is mere rhetoric, consider that the new version of
WebTV has a one-gigabyte drive included expressly for data broadcast.
Microsoft has a relationship with a data-broadcast company called
WavePhore, which will help distribute data over unused segments of
the television-broadcast spectrum known as the vertical blanking
interval. This VBI space, available on every TV channel, may prove
quite valuable. PBS already licenses its VBI bandwidth; others will
do the same. It will be interesting to see if networks such as ABC
can control the VBI space of their affiliates, or whether the
affiliates lease space to third parties. Still, VBI is a temporary
solution--it supports only a few hundred kilobits per second. The real
change will come from dedicated data channels that support 32
megabits per second.
Data broadcast may pose a challenge to companies, like Yahoo! and
America Online, that aggregate content in order to become major Web
destinations. The reason is that most available broadcast bandwidth
out there is already owned by TV stations, cable companies, and
satellite companies. Net-based content aggregators have no claim on a
broadcast feed.
Who wins? Hard-drive makers will have a huge new market. Companies
that have been in this market for years, such as WavePhore and Data
Broadcasting Corp., may finally break through. The
consumer-electronics industry will get a chance to replace the entire
installed base of CD players. However, the largest victor of all may
be TV broadcasters granted free licenses of spectrum originally meant
for HDTV. These vendors will reallocate this gift, valued by some at
over $70 billion, toward more realistic uses like data broadcast.
--------------
Also in this issue:
- Why Data Broadcast May Take Over the World
Wouldn't it be nice to have instant access to sports scores, stock
prices--even music and video? You will, once a new technology called
data broadcast takes off.
- China clamps new controls on Internet
BEIJING (Reuters) -- China clamped sweeping new controls on the
Internet on Tuesday, warning that the network was being used to leak
state secrets and to spread "harmful information."
- Health Help on the Net
Medical Websites are popping up all over the Net. Some are quackery,
but many offer invaluable advice.
- Japan Urged to Unmask Net Slanderers
The Japanese government should consider unmasking those who post
libelous, slanderous, or other damaging statements on the Internet,
an official study of the issue says - a breach of the nation's
constitutional guarantee of privacy of personal communications.
- Phone Rate Cuts Threaten Net Telephony, Report Says
LONDON -- Proposals to reduce the cost of international phone calls
could slow the spread of Internet telephony and other alternative
telephony networks, according to a paper published this month by
researcher The Yankee Group Europe.
- White House Rejects Call to Can Internet Czar
The Clinton administration has rejected a call from a top House
Republican to fire Internet policy czar Ira Magaziner in the wake of
a judge's finding that he and other White House officials offered
misleading information to fend off a lawsuit.
- AltaVista looks to new heights
Search engines are a natural first stop on the Web, and sites like
Yahoo!, Excite, Infoseek and Lycos have brought in additional
services to make those visits last a little longer. But Digital
Equipment Corp. has always kept its popular AltaVista site focused
exclusively on searches.
- New Lists and Journals
* jrlist - The Official Junior Vasquez Mailing List
* WLDADD - WOMEN and LD/ADHD: WLDADD is designed for professionals
in the fields of education, psychology, or health services, who
are interested in topics relating to women and l.d. and/or
attention deficit disorder.
* CHANGE: eoo - Essential Oils Online - Ezine
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