media what died a'bornin'

[John Foust]

At 12:52 AM 10/8/2004, Jos Dreesen wrote:
>A scheme, using data buried into the video signal  was used in Germany.
>During theTV  broadcast you could see the data as white stripes in the upper left corner.

Back in June 2001, this mailing list discussed the Infocipher modems,
circa 1990, an early cable-television-based broadcast mechanism.  
9600 baud, 24 hours a day, in a compressed, packeted and repeating stream.  
Megabytes a day, back in the days of 2400 baud modems.  

Makes you think this would be a great value-added for today's cable Internet
providers.  Instead of fighting P2P, sell it as an extra.  If it was
a one-way stream, it would give the system extra bandwidth.  It would
be a great way to let people download encoded video, for example,
like pay-per-view or a sliding window of shows, as the BBC proposes.
Click on the shows you want, wait a day, and they appear on
your hard disk.

- John