Data Broadcasting: The Changing Landscape - Page 1 of 4

By Peter J. Brown

The data broadcasting market is no easy thing to define these days. Can you blame it on the growing number of Gigabit Ethernet routers? Not exactly, but boundaries are certainly blurring as an IP-centric world emerges where lots of IP data is in motion. So many variations of the data broadcasting theme are cropping up that it is hard to sort through them.

In this IP centric world, how does data broadcasting really differ from content delivery, if at all? As you will see, there is a wide range of opinion on this issue.

"I don't see a difference," says Peter Neu, manager product marketing at ND Satcom in Friedrichshafen, Germany, which has Skystream Networks as a data broadcasting partner.

"There is a difference. Content delivery implies serving information from a location that is closer to the user than the origin," says David Lerner, COO of Certeon Inc. in Waltham, MA. Certeon formed earlier this year through the acquisition of InfoLibria's assets, including its information distribution products.

"Secure data broadcasting largely refers to real-time delivery of time critical data that could represent any type of content including video, audio, stock data and file distribution," says Sam Attisha, national director of sales for Irdeto Access. "Secure content delivery refers to a wider scope of real-time and non real-time delivery of digital assets in physical form as files, for example. Typically this distribution method has a one-to-one relationship, but does not exclude one-to-many delivery."

"The landscape is changing fast in terms of new technology. Content delivery and data broadcasting are the same thing," says David Spechman, CEO of Globecast America in Miami. "All the boundaries are blurred in this IP-centric world. And yet even as more video gets turned over to data, the traditional push, point-to-multipoint model remains unchanged."

What is happening here? For one thing, the marriage of IP and Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) supplemented by new tools and techniques such as the Multiple Protocol Encapsulation (MPE) standard is proving to be a wildly successful phenomenon unto itself.

"The data broadcasting market is still in its early days and experts continue to predict substantial growth throughout the next five to 10 years," says Ron Clifton, president and CEO of Ottawa-based International Datacasting. "The business case for satellite broadcasting is simply unbeatable, plus more end-users are realizing that IP via satellite is now plug and play with terrestrial networks."

Not New, Nor Stagnant

By the late 1980's, a number of companies including Reuters, Dow Jones and Co., the Associated Press, Thomson Financial, PR Newswire, Business Wire, McGraw-Hill's Standard and Poor's ComStock division, and approximately 30 other information companies adopted a solution from Mainstream Data in Utah. The company combined terrestrial FM radio data broadcasting with a small-dish satellite service, says Company President Scott Calder.

Initially, this involved an Equatorial Communications' spread spectrum C-band platform before it ultimately evolved into a proprietary FM2/Ku-band SCPC solution. A successful line of data broadcast satellite receivers also emerged for customers like the Stockholm Stock Exchange, the Shenzhen (China) Stock Exchange, and for most of the major business music providers such as AEI/DMX, 3M and Muzak/Alcas. But look again, and see how things have changed.

"The advent of the Internet brought with it several things, including the reality of ubiquitous interconnected computing, a dominant worldwide transmission protocol and a new economic reality that had dramatically reduced the premium one had to pay for interactivity (compared to broadcast)," says Calder.

The company's Medias platform acts as a communications terminal, provides integration of broadcast and Web content and performs as an application server as well. The European Pressphoto Association (EPA) selected Mainstream Data's Medias Server to distribute its photographs from Iceland to Greece, and from the Azores to Russia. It provides a communications and Web applications-enabled platform for information companies.

"Mainstream Data has adapted quickly," says Calder, whose company has teamed up with Airpath Wireless to address the growing ranks of Wi-Fi users via satellite-enabled hot spot buildouts, another potentially lucrative data broadcasting opportunity.

He is convinced that the era of a data broadcast business isolated from the greater data communications industry has passed. Traditional data broadcasters who purchased bulk satellite capacity from Panamsat, Loral and SES Americom only to resell it in smaller slices are being crushed by a declining market on the one hand and by vertically integrating suppliers-become-competitors on the other.

"In fact, it may already be too late for data broadcast companies that have not seen the future to embrace it. Traditional data broadcasters who have not already made the turn by adding applications to their transmission are dinosaurs and are destined for extinction," Calder says. "By contrast, we are capitalizing on our large base of blue-chip customers, and facilitating the integration of broadcast and interactive technologies as we move into a world where customers care about information, not transmission."