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

[Brandon Butterworth <brandon () rd bbc co uk>]

> You demonstrate you have no understanding of what the word 'feasable'
> means.

OK, but we actually did this as a commercial service on analogue TV and
we deliver non picture data on digital TV (satellite and terrestrial)
today, it's just not USENET data.

> One _cannot_ do this with 'modern' digital TV trasmission, because the
> _end-to-end_ technolgy does not support it.

Apologies for disagreeing, but this is exactly what the modern
technology does.

Digital TV (ATSC in your case, DVB-T & DVB-S in our case) has a
multiplex of a number of independent data streams that can be data,
video or audio. That is carried end to end.

We do this now with other data -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Red_Button

It'd be trivial for us to display USENET directly to read on your TV
or deliver it to the STB ethernet port

> OTOH, if the signal originates as a digital stream, while it may be
> "possible" to multiplex in an additional data stream, said data stream
> will *NOT* survive _intermediate_ transcoding to an analog video stream 
> before transmission to the end-user.

Indeed but that is not a digital TV system.

> And, even if the actual digital
> stream is delivered to the end-user, a *STANDARD* digital TV receiver has
> no means to deliver that 'additional' information to the end-user in any
> usableform.

Standard DTV PVR with an ethernet port are a few hundred dollars.

For the people who would actually receive this the box cost is trivial
they just some software. If you have a USB or PCI DTV rx it is trivial
to do whatever you like with the data.

brandon