Netflix Is Eating Up More Of North America's Bandwidth Than Any Other Company

Wed May 25 02:48:07 UTC 2011

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 08:12:31PM -0400, Max wrote:
> 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.
> 
<snip>

> > 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*
> >

As USENIX director I sponsored and sheparded this project, called "Stargate".
We at least got bits into the blanking interval at WTBS in Altanta.

-- 

-=[L]=-
Hand typed on my Remington portable

Real data are normal in the middle and Cauchy in the tails.