Was PBS one of the companies you are referring to? A colleague of mine worked as a developer on a project at PBS in the 90s that used the blanking interval for Internet transmissio - very cool stuff. On 5/19/11, Robert Bonomi <bonomi@mail.r-bonomi.com> wrote:
From nanog-bounces+bonomi=mail.r-bonomi.com@nanog.org Wed May 18 16:12:17 2011 Date: Wed, 18 May 2011 14:53:10 -0600 From: Brielle Bruns <bruns@2mbit.com> To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Netflix Is Eating Up More Of North America's Bandwidth Than Any Other Company
On 5/18/11 2:33 PM, Dorn Hetzel wrote:
If we're really talking efficiency, the "popular" stuff should probably stream out over the bird of your choice (directv, etc) because it's hard to beat millions of dishes and dvr's and no cable plant.
Then what won't fit on the bird goes unicast IP from the nearest CDN. Kind of like the "on demand over broadband" on my satellite box. Their selection sucks, but the model is valid.
If someone hadn't mentioned already, there used to be a usenet provider that delivered a full feed via Satellite.
There were, at different times, two companies that did that. Both went under because expenses exceeded income.
The one that was _much_ more interesting was the one that Lauren Weinstein had a hand in. It piggy-backed a Usenet feed in the vertical blanking interval of several big "independant" TV stations -- ones that were carried by practically every cable company in the country. Distribution to the cable companies was via satellite, but the USENET feed, being _part_ of the video signal, consumed _zero_ additional bandwidth, and rode the satellite links for free.
To get the feed, all you needed was a TV tuner with 'video out', and the purpose-huilt decoder box that extracted the vertical interval data.
This service died as the independants moved to encrypted transmission, because the encryption did _not_ perserve anything in the 'blanking' timeslot. only the 'viewable' field-image was trasmitted, _as_ a full-field image. Sync, blanking, etc. was _locally_ generated on the receiving end.
An "elegant" idea, done in by changing technology. *sigh*