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 <bon...@mail.r-bonomi.com> wrote: >> From nanog-bounces+bonomi=mail.r-bonomi....@nanog.org Wed May 18 16:12:17 >> 2011 >> Date: Wed, 18 May 2011 14:53:10 -0600 >> From: Brielle Bruns <br...@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* > > > >
