george@idis.UUCP (02/22/85)
Page 21 of the Feb 21 issue of the "Pittsburgh Post-Gazette" has an article from the "New York Times News Service". According to the article PBS, IBM, and Merrill Lynch are arranging a service to broadcast stock quotations and news on PBS for use with personal computers equipped with a decoder. It did not mention any technical specifications. If the effective bandwidth is large enough, perhaps Stargate could adopt their encoding. The benefits of volume, might provide some advantages. The article said, "[the venture] could bring in tens of millions of dollars in annual revenues."
lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (02/23/85)
I've talked to PBS in the past. They are very desperate for big bucks, and plan to be charging substantial money for what they consider to be a very valuable financial data stream service. That's the big problem with all these services, of course. The sort of data we want to send isn't very valuable in an absolute money sense, so we couldn't have flown at all unless we found someone willing to offer us very substantial bandwidth at bargain basement prices. I guess the key here is that our carrier is very "techie" oriented and not demanding a quickie return -- unlike other people. PBS has some unusual problems with which to deal, by the way. Among these are the facts that some of their affiliates in major cities are already running their own local news services over the vertical interval, and may be unwilling to give them up without a fight. Another problem (not so serious for financial data, but bad news for other sorts of things) is that many PBS affiliates are not 24 hour operations (KCET here in L.A. is off most of the night, for example). This will cut into the total bandwidth rather substantially. Of course, since financial data runs during the day anyway, they should be able to manage. By the way, I've been watching the decoder prices for the different services. So far, all of the mass-production vertical interval decoders I've seen are in the $500-$700 range. The new Stargate decoders (which will hopefully become available in March) are at the very bottom end of that range and are being mass-produced by Zenith. --Lauren--