From owner-freebsd-multimedia Wed May 14 14:29:07 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id OAA05557 for multimedia-outgoing; Wed, 14 May 1997 14:29:07 -0700 (PDT) Received: from agora.rdrop.com (root@agora.rdrop.com [199.2.210.241]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id OAA05551 for ; Wed, 14 May 1997 14:29:05 -0700 (PDT) Received: from labinfo.iet.unipi.it (labinfo.iet.unipi.it [131.114.9.5]) by agora.rdrop.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id OAA00586 for ; Wed, 14 May 1997 14:29:00 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (luigi@localhost) by labinfo.iet.unipi.it (8.6.5/8.6.5) id WAA27038; Wed, 14 May 1997 22:47:50 +0200 From: Luigi Rizzo Message-Id: <199705142047.WAA27038@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> Subject: Re: Teletext and intercast To: batie@aahz.jf.intel.com (Alan Batie) Date: Wed, 14 May 1997 22:47:49 +0200 (MET DST) Cc: richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk, multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: from "Alan Batie" at May 14, 97 11:51:12 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] Content-Type: text Sender: owner-multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Thanks, Alan, for posting this (I have read this and many other pages at the intercast site looking for technical specifications, but to no avail...) > >From the Intercast FAQ at http://www.intercast.org/info/info08.htm : > > Q5. Will the Intercast medium be available outside of the USA? > What are the plans for implementing Intercast technology on > the PAL broadcast standard? > > Initially, > Intel Intercast technology will be developed and deployed > in the United States and is based on the NTSC broadcast standard. > PAL is expected to be supported by the end of 1997. Differing > TV standards and government regulations in various countries > will have to be addressed before the Intercast medium can be > broadly deployed outside of the US. I think one should read between the lines... since here in europe we have Teletext almost everywhere since the early 80's, and at least in Italy (but I am sure in many many countries) major broadcast companies sell "pages" for commercial purpose (from advertising to software distribution), I have a hard time believing that there are technical or legal impedements to the deployment of something like intercast outside the US. Probably it's merely a question of whether or not there is a sufficiently large market to encourage companies to license the intercast approach as opposed to using public specifications such as Teletext, or proprietary encodings (which is what many are doing now). > Intel is investigating > the internationalization of the Intercast technology. ... As an aside: my TV unit (bought in 1992 but probably designed a couple of years before) has a browsing mode for teletext pages which is almost the same as Lynx, and when I bought the TV I had not seen yet a www browser! Intercast just adds some stronger FEC protection to data (teletext only has a very weak protection) so that graphics and HTML pages can be sent, and the use of a larger cache for "pages" (typical teletext decoders use a small SRAM as a cache, which can only hold a few (1..32) pages). Cheers Luigi -----------------------------+-------------------------------------- Luigi Rizzo | Dip. di Ingegneria dell'Informazione email: luigi@iet.unipi.it | Universita' di Pisa tel: +39-50-568533 | via Diotisalvi 2, 56126 PISA (Italy) fax: +39-50-568522 | http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/ _____________________________|______________________________________