GET your rain checks and excuses ready, the dreaded home movie is back with a
vengeance. And this time it won鈥檛 just be the occasional clip of your
neighbour鈥檚 camping holiday. Thanks to the Internet and satellite broadcasting
an endless stream of other people鈥檚 home movies will be beamed directly into
your home.
The idea of 鈥減ersonal broadcasting鈥� comes from satellite operator Eutelsat,
which thinks that enough people use digital camcorders and computer editing
equipment for it to catch on. Trials of the service, called Open-Sky, start in
Italy next month.
Eutelsat is inviting home-movie makers to upload their videos to a central
server, using a modem and phone line. Anyone with a dish and a PC can watch the
videos.
Advertisement
To make this possible, Eutelsat has developed a bridge between satellite and
Internet technologies. The video signal will be packet-based, like an Internet
message, and piggybacked onto a digital satellite broadcast.
To watch the movies, viewers connect a satellite dish to a decoder card
slotted into their PC, which converts the movie to a standard PC format. The
high bandwidth of the satellite link will provide full-screen video, rather than
the grainy low-resolution pictures we鈥檙e used to seeing over the Internet.
If the Italian trials are a success, Eutelsat will switch it on in the rest
of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East next year.